Designdamage Blog

Most business owners, experts and professionals understand the importance of providing non-promotional, educational content during the beginning of the relationship with a customer.

In essence, content marketing is information marketing, and information marketing is the new currency on the Internet. The challenge is how to translate your information into products with high perceived value.

It’s indicative that every business can now be called an information business because we all need some kind of information to make our decisions, learn how to solve our problems or to help us get what we want in life. Simply put we want our physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual needs met in order to take actions.

And getting people to take action through marketing is the most valuable skill anyone can learn and master. (Not to mention it’ll also improve your interpersonal relationships and communication skills.)

This is why great marketers focus on communicating the value and translating the utility of the information. Whether the goal is to get the prospect to click on your website link, sign up for your newsletter, join your coaching program or buy your information product, it requires meeting the right balance of Needs versus Wants from the prospect’s perspective.

Done right, you can leverage powerful internet tools to attract pre-interested and pre-motivated prospects that are ready to buy and start a business relationship with you. Not only will you be perceived as an influential authority but you will gain credibility and trust without having to convince people to buy your product.

So what does it take to be an effective marketer today? Here are six traits of highly effective marketers:

1. Effective Marketers Make No Assumptions

People often don’t question their own assumptions about what will work. Majority of the entrepreneurs, experts, marketers like to spill out their solution without asking what exactly their customers “think they want” that can solve their problems.

Imagine a doctor telling you what’s wrong with you by just looking at you from a distance. Even if the doctor has the correct diagnose, would you trust their advice? Great marketers know that they don’t know what they don’t know. They ask questions and dig deeper below the surface to identity the pain, urgency and frustration of their customers.

In addition to finding out what the problems are, it can also serve as your free market research. Start talking to all your prospects and customers everyday and continue asking why until you get to the root cause, you may be surprise what’s going on inside their reality.

Take a look at this recent research insight provided by MarketingSherpa and IDG from surveying buyers and B2B marketers about specific factors that motivate recipients to opt-in, open and engage with vendor email.

Notice the difference between what marketer and buyer values. Buyers actually gave the highest rank to promotional content!

2. Effective Marketers Are Storytellers

Once you have identified your customer’s problems, help them make the logical connection between their needs and your solution (product or services) one step at a time. This way they don’t have to work to figure out how to use your knowledge or expertise to solve their problem; instead you reverse engineer your solution from their problems.

Top marketers know how to connect the dots by using narrative to set the quickly get people’s attention. It’s one of the 3 most effective content marketing techniques you can use.

The idea is to ensure your solution sounds exactly like what’s going to solve their problem when you finally get to introduce it typically “at the end” so it’s easier to digest.  Keep in mind that you should never present your solution prematurely, it will only create disconnects which leads to distrust.

Maintaining the communication channel open is critical in facilitating the buying process because people don’t care about your products and services, they just care about themselves. So even with storytelling, guest who’s perspective and story do customers like to hear? (Hint: read the last sentence again.)

3. Effective Marketers Build Relationships

What is relationship and why important? Everyone talks about relationship but what exactly is relationship? Here is the definition of relationship from Wikipedia: “Relationships usually involve some level of interdependence. People in a relationship tend to influence each other, share their thoughts and feelings, and engage in activities together. Because of this interdependence, most things that change or impact one member of the relationship will have some level of impact on the other member.”

So a relationship can impact one another mentally, physically and emotionally. This is why social media is a great way to relate with each other to see if the other person is like you, identify a common ground to connect via LinkedIn, follow on Twitter and “friend” on Facebook. In fact, a relationship is a process to continue to relate until we feel related, full of emotions and thoughts of the other person.

A critical mistake many struggling experts, marketers and business owners make is thinking of their customers as “its” they can manipulate. Wrong!

Great marketers focus on building relationship to have trust, admiration and credibility that extends beyond business transactions not to mention people will buy more and refer to from those they like and trust.

4. Effective Marketers Are Givers

People often forget that trust is earned over time typically on a more intimate level. In order to introduce your great product or services, you need to earn the right to ask for the sell. This is the framework of the “freemium” business model, where you offer so much value to your prospect that their respect for you goes up instantly.

This requires you to supply relevant content or information and ultimately give away your best stuff to show that you’ve got the goods! (Do you?)

This feels counter-intuitive to most experts and business owners because they feel like they’ve earn the right to charge for their expertise or services through years of experience or training. The problem is they, the customers, don’t know and won’t believe that you’re in their best interest until they get to know you.

Effective marketers aren’t afraid to give away their best stuff because knowing how to drive a car doesn’t mean you’ll win a race even if you start with the fastest car.

Authors like Seth Godin, Yaro Starak, Brian Clark, Michael Steizner and Darren Rowse are great example of over-delivering their value so when it’s time to ask for a sale, readers usually come to expect and respect what they bring to the table.

5. Effective Marketers Know Everything Is A Test

Today, the market moves so fast that it’s important to understand the real goal of marketing is to focus on the long-term strategies to get customers.

There is no silver bullet that will bring you sustainable instant results. In fact, it’s vital to have the right mindset knowing that every action you take is to validate your ideas from fact gathering.

Great marketers do not hold their ego to their chest; they look for facts and data that enable them to make incremental improvements.

This is why direct response marketing delivers better results than institutional branding and advertising. They have different appeals with different purpose but direct marketing is more effective in small to medium size business than branding or making logos and websites “look nice.” Your investment in marketing efforts should always be measurable in some ways, think of it as making progress not perfection.

The best marketing ROI is about profiting from the time and money invested in your tests! You would test the water before you jump into the pool or drink a hot soup right?

6. Effective Marketers Are Laser Focused On A Niche

Successful marketer choose a niche and stick to it. They inject all the experience, knowledge, theories and ideas they have and consistently create content around it. Everything is narrowly focused so it speaks to those that are looking for solutions in that topic.

They deliver bite size chunks of information to ensure that their audience learn and take actions. Ultimately it’s about delivering value that are solutions not just suggestions.  Since people aren’t good at valuing anything with out learning (more information again), top marketers knows to create techniques or systems that enable the prospects to understand the value of the solution.

Simply put, great niche marketing minimizes misunderstand and delivers high value information that pushes the buy button. And to do that, it requires focusing on the needs of the customer without assumptions. (goes back to#1 above)

A great method to do that is to learn Neil Rackham’s SPIN Selling technique by focusing on asking the right Situational questions (find out what’s going on), Problem questions (challenges happening), Implication questions(what the challenge implies) and the Needs-payoff questions (the price tag on solving the challenge).

The take away: Marketing is a skill that you can learn and should be practiced everyday. In fact, thanks to the internet today there is very little barrier to entry for anyone to do marketing. The information are all out there, you just need to follow some simple steps to start marketing your product, services or your personal brand.

The six traits are the building blocks to form powerful influence which is explained by Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion as ethical persuasion in reciprocity, scarcity, liking, authority, social proof, and commitment/consistency.

What do you think the most important trait of a marketer is? What worked well or not so well for you? Love to hear your comments, share it with everyone!

I saw a video on the State of Social CRM post on Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang in which Paul Greenberg talks about how companies are having difficulties with cultural changes internally to execute against the new bread of customer, the social customer.  In case you don’t know what CRM is, it’s Customer Relationship Management as described in Wikipedia as a “technology that allows companies to organize, automate, and synchronize business processes—principally sales activities, but also those for marketing, customer service, and technical support. The overall goals are to find, attract, and win new clients, nurture and retain those the company already has, entice former clients back into the fold, and reduce the costs of marketing and client service.”

What an ear full!

My version would be just an application that keeps track of customer facing activities so you can find the gaps in your service and make adjustments to be more efficient.

The point both Jeremiah and Paul are making is that businesses are still figuring out how to integrate CRM and Social Media so the combination provides meaningful business value. The shift in how customers use social media is forcing companies to add the social element into their CRM system. They’re both spot on.

It also raises the question that if you’re not in the business of generating value and serving to keep the customer, then what are you in business for?

Social media encourages interaction which leads to generating a new type of intelligence that CRM system were not tracking before. Data such as reactions, activities, sentiments, locations, behavior and preference are converging providing a never seen before clear picture of each customer.

So how does this change the dynamics of your business moving forward?

Well, for one thing you have more leverage as a result of having more available data to target your niche and identify your prospects. In fact, as social CRM matures, I would expect to see companies shift their corporate strategy to ensure that every aspect of customer touch point is aligned with their marketing and sales strategy. And this is the reason why it requires a true “cultural” change, a mindset really, for businesses to not just think from the perspective of their customer but to become their customer, to feel and empathize with them.

Furthermore, this would mean that the employees may have to do the same by constantly thinking and enhancing the customer experience to the fullest. Instead of just using tools to do sentiment analysis by listening in on what customers are saying, companies can anticipate what customers will say and do before they’ve done it.

Checkout how Salesforce is making their CRM social with Twitter.

This would probably be the ideal desire outcome for most businesses: to proactively facilitate prospects and customers toward a market funnel and minimize customer frustration as problems are addressed before they happen.

Imagine a prospect is interested in finding out more about your product before a purchase, not only would you be able to answer questions using social CRM data to anticipate them, but to personalize your communication and create real-time offering to increase the rate of conversion.

By delivering relevant communication crafted with exactly what the customers want at the right place at the right time, this will be the next phase of effective social influence marketing.

The take away: It is important to recognize this emerging trend in CRM and social media. Even though a cultural shake out would be necessary for companies to fully utilize the benefits of social CRM, it would be wise to start making some basic evaluation of how going social may impact your operations and bottom line. What’s needed to make that jump and if you’re already using a CRM system, think how you can rally your staff to start thinking about new marketing processes and research more on how you can streamline social media into your CRM.

You spent countless hours crafting your marketing campaign investing money and hiring marketing experts to help guide you through the process. You get ready to push the launch button, waiting for emails and phone calls come pouring in, then…

Nothing happens. But what could go wrong?

You did the things that the marketing “experts” said you should do with your keywords, putting up blog articles day after day, uploading videos and sending out email newsletters.

Why?

Here are 10 reasons why you’re not getting the attention, buzz and most importantly – the sales conversion. Oh, and let’s assume you have an unbelievable product.

1. Your marketing message is full of “I” and “me” instead of “you.”
2. You didn’t communicate the “why” (from the “I” perspective)
3. You didn’t communicate the “what” (again from the “I” perspective)
4. You didn’t communicate the “how” (need I say more from which perspective?)
5. You didn’t communicate the “what if” (as in what if “I” was to buy and use the product)
6. Your marketing talks at people about your own expertise instead of showing them how your solution solves their problem.
7. You make assumptions about your customers (because you already sold some products before or you just know because you’ve been doing it for 20 years, ok great continue to do that then) instead of focusing on fact gathering (read my last post on listening)
8. You didn’t do enough testing on your products, services or marketing messages before you launch
9. You use all your email and social media as a one way push advertising instead of two way conversation (to help you pre-test)
10. You lack compassion and didn’t empathize with your prospects because you’re too focused on the bottom line – making money

The talk away: Don’t be all things to all people. You’ll have a better opportunity to convert sales (subscription, readership etc.) if you narrow down your target market because you’re a big fish in a small pond so just go after more small ponds! Don’t swim with the sharks in the big ocean because chances are, you’ll become their lunch.

Ask yourself if your marketing message is tangible, external, specific and measurable to your target prospect? And try NOT to use the word “I” or “me” in your message.

Here is one of my all time favorite (and world famous ad) created by the genius David Ogilvy. Notice how many “I” or “me” were used in this ad – none. Focus on the title and you’ll learn how this 1959 ad is still the foundation of today’s direct response marketing.

Over the past months I wrote about how to find your customers in order to improve your customer segmentation and gain better understanding of your niche market. Everything goes back to connecting with your audience so you can craft campaigns utilizing tactics such as email marketing, SEO and social media. Then as more businesses learned the tools of the trade, I brought up the point of adding value on my last post because ultimately knowledge will be commoditized similar to most disruptive technologies. The trick is maximizing the use of your knowledge (when it’s still valuable) to help you grow your business and become an authority in your domain expertise.

If there is one thing that technology won’t be able to replace (at least not easily) it would be the content of your communication. Every business and individual are elevating the concept of the freemium model, publishing free valuable content on the social web, competing for clicks, eyeballs and engagement opportunities. It’s what Seth Godin calls “permission marketing”, what Hubspot calls “inbound marketing” and what Joe Pulizzi of Junta42 calls “content marketing.”

However you like to label it, it’s basically creating content that communicates the value in which your target audience values then leveraging it as the bait to attract those in need of your solution (products or services). This is a highly targeted approach like design thinking, social design and service design that truly serves up what’s going to solve a problem rather than just bunch of trivia concepts or random thoughts. It’s also a validation on how your content is really worth on the internet where content is the new currency.

And to stay competitive and survive the ongoing challenges marketers and business owners are presently facing, they need to reassess the way they build and maintain relationships with customers. A product or service is merely a means to an outcome. The real core value lies in the story attached and that is where marketing truly shines.

I don’t want to use a microwave – I want the ability to quickly eat hot food so I can get on with my life. I didn’t go to Home Depot to buy paint – I want a painted wall for my new living room. I don’t want to use Google – I want answers to my questions now.

You see, you may be very good at what you do but your communication may not do you justice and as a result you end up with lame content that just sounds like everyone else. And to make matters worse, if you don’t know how to market your content, your content will just sit on the web with little to no traffic.

Unfortunately this is not going to help you in translating how great your product is or how much value you can bring to the table. In this article, I will explain what to listen for and how to take quantitative measures from listening so you can drill down to the minds of your customers. Then I will show you how to communicate effectively so your solution sounds exactly like what’s going to solve your prospects’ problem.

Step 1: Gather Information by Listening

Many people know the concept of listening and yet few are able to do it well (everyday I continue to practice listening). Listening is a form of information gathering which allows you to take in the data, process and abstract meaning out of the dialogue. In a typical conversation people tend to wait for their turn to talk rather than actually absorbing the meaning of the words. We all have some sort of attention deficit as the by product of all the distractions around us from cell phones to emails, from writing a blog article to meeting with your team, from preparing dinner to picking up your kids, we live in a fast pace society.

The trick is to unlearn your habits of making assumptions and let go of as much preconceived thoughts as possible and simply focus on what’s been said at the moment of the conversation. Think of it as taking a training course and preparing your mind to get into the learning mode so you can pay 100% attention during the interaction.

Listen for key emotional phrases that are connected to a person’s problem. Typically it will sound like this: “my business is xxx” or “I want to xxx but xxx is xxx”, try to dig deeper and get the frustration and emotions out of the conversation. This helps you to identity what that person values and where the connection points can be made. Take notes if you have to but avoid memorizing what you want to say (I know you want to help) because you will be interrupting the other person and stop listening altogether. When you try to do anything but listen, you also break the flow of the other person’s thought and the energy of the dialogue making it harder to identify the key emotional points. Take notes and wait until the other person finishes.

Easy right? It takes practice. Plus if you’re good at what you do, you should be able to provide instant feedback by looking at your notes.

Remember, people don’t care what you have to say unless you show how much you care about what they have to say and how they feel. Yes, how they feel is where the connection point can be made. This is why great sales people always listen first and ask questions later allowing their prospects to fully emerge into an emotional output session. This is a skill that takes practice so try it with your friends, colleagues or family as often as possible. You may find that this will help you discover more about them and can also help them to understand you better. It all starts with listening.

Step 2: Pinpoint Signals Avoid The Noise

The key to forging a powerful connection with your audience is to first understand that people simply want to be heard and understood. If you can describe your prospect or customer’s problem better than they can, they will automatically assume that you may have the solution to their problem (most of the time). Even if you don’t have the exactly solution, it’s a great way to establish a common ground for the relationship you’re forging.

And why do we want to connect with others? It’s just how we build trust, the “wow, this person gets me…” or the “OMG, you know exactly what I’m going through!…” emotional connection. Not everyone is good at communicating their problems, thus when someone perceives that you sound and looks like an expert, you may just become the expert that’s going to solve their problem (or maybe you are an expert? But are you just an expert in your own mind?).

Keep in mind that the focus is on validating your assumptions. Ask questions that helps to confirm their pain points, their vision of success or their desired outcome. This requires a lot of critical thinking and again do not formulate conclusions from your assumptions unless you have enough information. Otherwise go back to step 1 and ask more open-ended questions so you can listen again.

This of course, applies to all form of conversations including blogging, social media and email exchanges. The idea is to abstract the emotional triggers from the depth and tonality of the conversation so you can fully understand the opportunities to build meaningful connects. If you ask the wrong questions, it just shows you don’t get it and you’re eager to sell yourself, your story and your products. You will get your turn but you must be able to distinguish the signals from the noises.

At this stage, you should still be more reactive allowing your customer to freely express themselves. The most valuable information are those that are freely expressed without boundaries from your prospects. This is also the core value of surveying your customers so you can apply what you’ve learned to improve your product and services.

Step 3: Build Connections That Create Convictions

Once you’ve got solid understanding of the problems your customers want to solve, you then must learn to get into the minds of your prospects so you can turn them into customers. This is the “I heard, I know, I understand, I believe and I do,” steps that lead to actions through the use communication.

Most people are good at passing through “I know and I understand” stage, but it’s the “I believe” stage that communication often fails to connect resulting in no action. You buy a product or change an unhealthy habit because you would only take the action after you become convinced of your decision. Most people don’t realize that a desired action is often brought out through the use of specific communications tools from advertising to word-of-mouth testimonial, or via social proof endorsements. Simply put, people don’t just do what we want them to do because we want them to do it; they need to convince themselves first by having the right information.

And how do they know that it’s right for them? Well it’s by moving through each of these communications steps that people will take action. So if the “I heard” part doesn’t resonate, it won’t move into the next step and in most cases it’s your professional jargon or the inability to identify what it is that your customer really values. So your job as someone with the solution should be to help by facilitating them through that discovery process and not forcing your ideas upon them. Again, it’s not trying to convince them, but helping them to convince themselves.

A great marketer knows how to unleash the power of communications and seeks to understand their target market needs, perceptions and how they like to receive information.

Is it how expensive (monetary value) your products are? Or how much time you’ve invested creating your solution? Perhaps it’s the work and labor you’ve put into your services. Whatever it is, they must do the job of translating why they should take action to contact your or buy your product.

Step 4: Convert With Meaningful Communication

Once your prospect is convinced of their decision, there usually is no turning back as the human brain will attempt to rationalize that decision from the emotions of wanting to feel good about moving forward and the urgent need to solve their problem.

It’s indicative that most “modern” businesses realize that customers respond more to an emotional connection, thus it’s not about selling but educating. And educating requires providing how you are going to make their lives easier from a more personal perspective. This is the part where traditional business owners have a hard time letting go of what they perceive as high value in their knowledge. It’s true that giving away your knowledge can feel like doing something for free that you usually get paid for, the key is figuring out where to draw the “free line.”

However; I’ve found in many instances, people simply won’t do it even if you provide detail step-by-steps. For example, recently I wrote a detailed article on “how to use Goolge and Twitter to find your customers,” and have received many emails from people telling me that I’m stupid for giving out such high value content. As a result not only have I gotten more leads and referrals but I was able to sign up clients while using it to make a case for content marketing, sort of proofing that this stuff works!

You must be able to paint the picture and hit home with what your solution looks like to your prospects, communicate the results they will achieve and the steps they will need to take in order to achieve those results.

Sounds simple but all too often I came across marketing messages full of features and benefits (especially for technology companies or specialty industries) that typically starts with “our innovative products are designed for xxxx,” “our company has xxxx technology that’s xxxx” or the ever popular “xyz company is the leader in xxxx and have xx years of experience…”

So what does it all sound like to the prospect? It’s all about YOU, not them and that’s not going to take you far. Businesses are quick to tell people what they have but forget that their prospects are in different stage of the buying cycle. It’s important to speak the language that they understand and values which is why you need to focus on their needs. So what if you’re an innovative company or a leader in your space? Who isn’t innovative and a leader in their space these days?

The Take Away: The meaning of your communication is the response you get from your audience. If you don’t like the responses you get, you’re not doing a good job of translating your value. If you can do step 1-3 well, you should have good amount of data to start writing great sales copies and headlines that gets inside the heads of your customers.

And by using what Robert Cialdini’s six “weapons of influence” (reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking and scarcity), you will end up with powerful communications that gets you phone calls and inbound traffics. The worse that can happen is you actually don’t have a solution but you marketed as a solution, or your product sucks and it doesn’t solve any problem. In that case great marketing can only help you fish for a day because the fish will learn that your bait isn’t a real one.

What do you think? Are you communicating the right way? Leave me a comment below or share your most effective marketing copy.

Recently I purchased a new vehicle and was excited about the whole experience. I’ve had many cars in the past and the part that always annoys me is feeling the pressure to buy from the sales people on the floor.

But this one is different.

It was like two friends talking about cars and with no initiation about buying. She wasn’t worry about selling.

Obviously I purchased the car and about 3 weeks later I had to go in for some service and again the experience was painless and I even got a loaner car to drive for a few days.

I was so thrilled that I wanted to endorse them by leaving reviews on their social network profile. Then I discovered a string of negative reviews online and what’s worse is that they received an average of 2 out of 5 stars on multiple websites.

So I called the sales person that sold me the car and she said she will help me pass it to her corporate marketing executive. Below is a slightly altered version to keep both the dealership and sales person confidential:

=================================================================

Dear Jenny (not real name)

I’m a happy customer because I had a great experience buying a vehicle from you. It was enjoyable and I felt no pressure or that I wasn’t been judged.

When I came in for a service a month later, your service department was superb not to mention I can talk to the technician forever. The car was serviced promptly and the entire process was painless.

With such exceptional service and people, why is it that your dealership only gets

• 3 out of 5 stars from Google?
• 2.5 out of 5 stars from Yelp?
• 3 out of 5 stars from Edmunds?

The reason is simple. No one is managing your company’s reputation online.

People typically would only review something when they’re either excited, happy, satisfied or vice versa; frustrated, angry or dissatisfied. Looking at some of the reviews you will find YOUR NAME is all over the positive side, which is the reason why not all the reviews are negative.

As you can see the negative reviews out weights the positive reviews. Nobody from your company is defending the dealership brand and it’s unfortunate because your car manufacturer makes a product that practically sells itself.

But does your dealership have any loyal fans that would refuse to go to other dealerships because they love you guys so much? Does your dealership have any advocates internally or externally that promotes the positive things about your company?

Does your management care? And what are they doing about it? Is the entire business run on listing cars on websites, classifieds, and print advertising? Then why should I come back to buy my second and third vehicle from you?

There is NOTHING on your website that shows credibility of your great sales people, hardworking service advisers, happy technicians or a sense of strong community. Just bunch of product photos, inventory listing and resources that every other car dealership has on their website.

How can I trust your brand? I only walked in your dealership knowing there is a deal NOT because I know Jenny Smith, the awesome sales person was there. If your dealership competes ONLY on price, then it’ll be very difficult to build value in the business because there won’t be any long-term customer relationship forged that way. And that’s not what your GM wrote to me in his thank you email.

Unless you’re selling a commodity such as water, people don’t buy what you sell, they buy the experience! And even water brands are working hard to differentiate from the competition, what marketing efforts are you doing to differentiate? What reasons are you giving me to talk about your company and your people?

Now, would I recommend your dealership? Sure but I would tell people to ask for Jenny in sales and Kevin in service.

Sincerely,

Eric Tsai

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Reputation Management is Marketing

It should come to no surprise that reputation management is marketing. And crisis management cross over to reputation management as well, thus it should be considered as marketing too.

Take a look at the recent two big crisis for these two brands: Tiger Woods and Toyota. One is a billion dollar personal brand and the other one is a multi-billion dollar consumer products brands.

For Tiger Woods, he opted to go with the silent treatment, laying low to let things wane a bit and the conversation just kept going. Even after his public statement, the damage has already been done, sponsors dropped him and fans still skeptical on his integrity.

With Toyota, it’s indicative that there is no magic solution to fix a fundamental problem on a technical issue on the accelerator. The key is to manage the crisis in a way to mitigate negative press going viral as it did on Twitter just check the #Toyota hashtag.

According to AdAge, “on Jan. 22, the day after the recall, buzz within the social web skyrocketed, with the number of posts about the automaker going from less than 100 to over 3,200. With the stop-sale announcement four days later, online chatter shot from about 500 posts that morning to more than 3,000 by that afternoon.”

In both cases, the respond time is  just as critical as what’s been communicated.

As we continue to transition to the social and relationship-focused era, companies will no longer be able to ignore social media and online marketing because the truth of the matter is the more social you are and the more transparency you expose, you’re more likely to convert the sales and retain loyalty.

And if you’re able to provide a community for your fans, customers, staff or even vendors to interact and engage with each other, they’re also more likely to buy repeatedly not to mention providing you with referral business as well.

According to the latest report from Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate, “social friends and followers feel more inclined to purchase from the brands they are fans of… 60% of respondents claimed their Facebook fandom increased the chance they would recommend a brand to a friend. Among Twitter followers, that proportion rose to nearly 8 in 10.”

Social Networks Continue to Grow

And it helps that social network giant like Facebook is now just as popular as Google according to Hitwise,”Facebook reached an important milestone for the week ending March 13, 2010 and surpassed Google in the US to become the most visited website for the week… Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week. ”

Just look at the chart below and you’ll see how Facebook have exploded while Google maintains its steady traffic. Why the exponential? For one, Facebook is a great way to get started with social media since most people will already have a couple of hundred friends that they can talk to about anything.

For businesses in the offline world to reach customers they would have to make hundreds if not thousands of phone calls or send out loads of flyers that would cost lots of money and resource. Now companies can do that a couple of times a day for free through a Facebook page or a Twitter tweet.

The take away: All businesses should start exploring with social media to find their sweet spot. Traditional media channel such as advertising on TV, magazines or billboards can still be expensive with unpredictable results. Social media has a low barrier to entry (yes it’s cheap) and allows you to meet people in a fraction of the time that it would take in the real world to start building meaningful relationships.

However; you must factor in the the resources and time spent on social media marketing, because it can get out of hand which can lead to inefficiency and ultimately costing you more.

You don’t even need to have a profile on every social network like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Simply focus on one that you’re comfortable with, develop a process in which you can implement a systematic approach and see what results you get. If you get the result you like, keep doing it. If you don’t, try something else.

Whether you like it or not, people will continue to talk about your brand and you can either choose to ignore it or do something about it.