Google Instant: Employees Tell The Story Through Video
Posted on 08. Sep, 2010 by Brian Fluhr in Video Marketing
There are many things to like, love and possibly even hate about Google. Today, Google announced a new search feature that is really pushing search optimization and results to a new level. But this post is not about Google Instant, it is about the video Google created to tell the story behind Google Instant as it introduces this new search paradigm.
This video caught my attention not because of the Google Instant service, but because the way the story was told. As Google often does with its videos, it uses real employees to tell the story – in a very simple and human way. There are no actors, little special effects – just everyday employees sharing the passion for what they have created. There is no doubt, Google Instant itself is the real story, but the way it is shared through video is a lesson that can be learned from all companies that leverage video marketing. Here it is:
If your employees are passionate about the products and services they help to deliver, maybe its time share that passion through video?
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Social Media Marketing Verses Advertising, PR and Sales
Posted on 30. Aug, 2010 by Brian Fluhr in Social Media
It’s understandable that businesses still question social media.
Is it safe? Where’s the ROI? Is it just a waste of time? Will social media really help to increase sales and grow our business? Will social media save our business?
The reason its understandable, is that most businesses, actually people, don’t have a clear understanding of what social media is and how it compares to the forms of advertising and marketing communications channels businesses have accepted as the de facto standard for where to spend the marketing budget.
Here’s a definition of social media marketing that I found to be very clarifying. It was created by David Meerman Scott:
You can buy attention (advertising)
You can beg for attention from the media (PR)
You can bug people one at a time to get attention (sales)Or you can earn attention by creating something interesting and valuable and then publishing it online for free: a YouTube video, a blog, a research report, photos, a Twitter stream, an ebook, a Facebook page.
If you think this explanation makes sense, than it should be apparent that social media is much more than having a presence on Facebook or Twitter. It is even more than just participating. Social media marketing results requires a focused campaign efforts, where your brand becomes a central source for content that benefits both your business and the community you build around that content.
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- David Meerman Scott: Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead (huffingtonpost.com)
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OC Ad Agency Agrees With Vaynerchuk – Social Media Brings The ROI
Posted on 27. Aug, 2010 by Brian Fluhr in Social Media
Today I came across a gem from 2008 from Wine Library’s Gary Vaynerchuk that really sums up our thinking at MarketingOC. As an Orange Count Ad Agency, we choose to not always speak as direct as we would like when it comes to where our clients should be spending their media budgets – so it’s nice when someone else, who we respect says what we are thinking so we don’t have too!
Take it away Gary…
What do you think of Gary’s rant?
Is Social Media Making Your Business Look Like Your Competition?
Posted on 26. Aug, 2010 by Brian Fluhr in B2B Marketing, Blog, Inbound Marketing, Social Media, Social Media Sales
Businesses are always looking for their unique voice – that special value proposition that you offer your prospects and customers. That uniqueness that makes you different and enables you to stand above the competition. Maybe it is value, features, benefits, price, service, brand – every business needs to feel that they are offering some advantage for customers to buy your product or use your service rather than the competition.
Many businesses have embraced having a Facebook page or a Twitter presence as part of their unique value proposition. We have all seen this on TV, Print, Radio and of course the web sites we all visit.
COMPANY X Is Now On Twitter!
Become A FAN On our Facebook Page!
This is indeed, a positive step forward in reaching your audience where they are spending time. However, leveraging social medial often results in sameness - Company Y has a Facbook Page, we should have one too. Instead of showcasing the real value of your offering, reaching the specific audiences that your business targets, engaging new prospects with an innovative social media campaign to stimulate conversation: your business becomes just another page in the social media landscape. Yes, you may build followers, but so is your competition. And that’s the problem. If you are not using social media to differentiate your business, to share the unique value your business offers to your audience, then you become just another me to company that has a social media presence because that’s just what every business seems to be doing today.
Social media provides the opportunity for your business to precisely focus on your target audience and to demonstrate your points of unique value.
Here Are Five Action Items To Demonstrate Your Unique Value Through Social Media
1. Create a company blog the focuses on your target audiences – perhaps create two or more!
Your business needs a blog. I assume you know that by now, but what if you are not leveraging that blog to reach your audience? You need to be as specific as possible with your content. It will help with reaching your audience, but also with SEO and lead generation. If your business focuses on different industries, say healthcare and transportation – it may not be a great idea to have only one blog – as the audiences in these industries, may be very different. So, just as you may have vertical channel managers, it can make perfect sense to have a blog channel dedicated to your key verticals. Your blog(s) should serve as the hub of your social media activities, not Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn. These are just channels, your blog is your social media home. Integrate your blog into your website and focus on great content that will drive your social, seo and lead pipeline.
2. Have a specific objective.
Being there is not an objective. I often hear from clients that they need to have a Facebook page. But what they really need is a strategy to reach prospects through the channel that is Facebook or Twitter or ???. The suggestion I have is to set your objective to drive new leads to your web site and/or your business. Inbound marketing that leverages social media is how sales are started today. When was the last time you took a sales call from a sales person?
3. Remember social media is for your business to connect with people.
Ask many social media gurus they will tell your social media is all about the people. Not so, if you are in business. Most businesses exist to make money. This money comes from relationships indeed. But if you are clear and transparent in you reasons for using social media (to increase your business) you can be clear in your efforts to connect with your audience who wants to buy your product You connect with people online the same way you do offline, you initiate conversation or your audience start the conversation – but online you can efficiently reach more people over a much broader geographical area. Just like offline, people want to work with people that they know, trust and like. Social media provides you with the opportunity to grow your network exponentially, without having to leave the office.
4. Forget the rules – (sort of)
There is plenty advice out there on social media best practices and rules. The reality is, the rules that apply are the very same rules that govern how you communicate offline or through email. Don’t be annoying. Add value to someone’s day, life or business. That’s really it!
5. Apply what you or your marketing team already knows about marketing
Social media is just another communication channel. The foundations of good marketing still applies in this space. If you conduct all marketing in house, give social media a try. But really commit to it. Hiring a part time college student to create your social media strategy is a mistake. They can help you execute, but you probably won’t entrust an inexperienced marketer to run your TV ad campaign if that was the channel you were using. Why entrust inexperience to your social media channel? If you use an ad agency, chat with them about your goals, if you want to talk to a team of folks who live and breathe social media and marketing, then contact MarketingOC
Don’t Rely On Facebook To Be Your Social Media Marketing Home
Posted on 19. Aug, 2010 by Brian Fluhr in Blog, Social Media, Social Media Sales, Social Media Sales
- Image via Wikipedia
At MarketingOC, we sing the very true mantra that to reach your prospects and reach your customers, you need to go where they are spending time. More often than not, whether you are marketing B2B or B2C – that means setting up a presence and running a campaign on Facebook. It just makes sense. Facebook is where more people are turning to connect with friends and businesses. So, of course, we encourage our clients to work with us to set up their Facebook page and to create a presence on the social network that everybody seems to love (and even if someone hates it, they still know that they need to have a presence so they can check on all their friends and favorite businesses!)
While it may make sense to participate on Facebook – run a Facebook marketing campaign or leverage Facebook to generate leads – it is absolutely does not make sense to ditch your web site as your campaign headquarters for reaching your prospects and customers. Leveraging your web site or blog as the hub of your social media is essential. With your blog as your hub, you control the look and feel, can see the analytics, can do as you please. That’s not true with Facebook. With Facebook, your business is somewhat at the whim of their decisions. Take the recent change in page width. This reduction from 720 to 520 pixels is a major change to the designs of many businesses welcome pages- and I am sure that this change will come as a great surprise to many businesses when they visit their Facebook page on August 23rd. See Patrick’s previous post.
So, do you your business a favor – set up a great blog, publish great content, distribute that content via Facebook and social media and use Facebook as a marketing channel, but not your social media marketing home. Better yet, contact MarketingOC – we will help you focus your social medial sales and marketing efforts.
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The Real Reason You Need An Ad Agency
Posted on 05. Aug, 2010 by Brian Fluhr in Lead Generation, Social Media Sales
At MarketingOC we get the real reason your company needs us.
It’s not JUST….
To build your web site
To create your mobile marketing presence
To create your social media strategy
To better optimize your web site to improve your SEO rankings
To create custom Facebook, Twitter or YouTube channels
To produce an engaging video
To design your email marketing campaign….
Sure – it is these services that often leads clients to our agency, but the real reason we exist – and the real reason you need MarketingOC – is that you need to reach more targeted prospects, to drive more leads, to reach your audience where they are spending time, to fill your sales pipeline full of — well, sales opportunities. Marketing strategies and tactics that fuels sales - that’s what your ad agency or marketing partner needs to deliver to your business.
It all starts wtih understanding your business needs and equally important, the needs of your prospects and customers. Then it is about creating the campaign and executing that campaign through the the communication channels that are most effective in reaching your audience, and driving the sales you need. In other words, when we understand: what your selling, who you are selling to, why what you are selling is important to your buyers – then we can provide you with the right marketing tactics to engage your customers and increase sales.
Sales – that’s the real value of marketing – and the value that MarketingOC strives to provide our clients. So if you need sales, then you may just need MarketingOC!
Leveraging Social Media Marketing For B2B Sales
Posted on 05. Aug, 2010 by Brian Fluhr in B2B Marketing, Blog, Social Media
Social media is often considered to be more consumer-oriented but social media has a very real – very positive impact on B2B marketing and sales. The B2B selling and buying process has fundamentally changed. Cold calls and outbound marketing are not as effective as they once were. Buyers do not want to be interrupted in the middle of their very busy day to listen to your pitch.
Your prospects do however, take the time on their mobile phones and on their desktops to search the web to conduct independent research, obtain information from their peers and review past purchase experiences from others via social media. The traditional methods of selling are quickly becoming obsolete — to be successful today’s sales professional need to engage in social selling: leveraging social media to both better listen and more effectively engage with prospects and customers.
Think your prospects aren’t using social media to learn about your business? Think again!
More and more prospects are relying on the content found in social media channels to educate themselves about a company’s brand, products and services. Just think about what happens if a prospect performs a search on Google for your business or product and service and your listing did not appear? Guess what….your prospect will look at your competitors who do appear! The same situation applies in social media. Social media plays an in?uential role in the B2B decision-making process. As a result, B2B company should use social media to monitor what existing customers and prospects are saying about their company, capture interest from prospects looking for their products and solutions, and coordinate the marketing and sales follow-ups to turn social media interactions into social media sales.
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Mobile Web Sites May Not Be Sexy But They Sure Are Useful
Posted on 14. Jul, 2010 by Brian Fluhr in Blog, Mobile Marketing, Mobile Websites
Web designers and marketing team are used to creating a traditional web site experience that is that is full of brand elements, stunning design and tons of bells and whistles to engage your site visitors and to lead them along a carefully constructed path to achieve a “conversion.” Perhaps that conversion is a white paper download, or information request, or sales call request or the holy grail: a product purchase. And while it seems that there is a focused sales funnel leading to that conversion – there are often many possible distractions along the way – a banner ad here, a video there, a blog post there – yes all these elements may help you to engage with your site visitors on their widescreen desktop monitors, but what happens when a prospect visits your web site from their mobile phone?
Let’s take a look at American Airlines well traveled web site: AA.com.
Here is how AA.com looks in a desktop web browser:
Here is how AA.com looks on an Iphone when viewed in Full HTML mode:
You can see there are a lot of options that are work perfectly fine for desktop viewing but not so great on a mobile phone. You can accomplish most of the same tasks you can with the desktop version, except, for a user to navigate the site on their mobile phone, they will have to pinch, stretch and scroll around a lot. Not a real friendly experience. This is an example of how your web site may appear in a mobile browser if it has not been optimized for mobile.
Here is the mobile web site for AA.com
A couple of things to point out here.
1. Typing aa.com into the Safari mobile browser takes you right into the mobile web site rather than the full web site. Mobile device detection is used – immediately recognizing that I was asking to view on AA.com on my Iphone, as a result, the mobile web site was presented (all without me having to request a specific URL on my own)
2. This mobile web site is not sexy. It is not beautiful. It is not stunning. It is however very useful. Very useful for accessing the exact information customers need while they are on the go.
The key take away is not that mobile web sites should be ugly or that they shouldn’t contain brand elements because they can indeed represent your company and brand in a positive way – but the end goal is to ensure that your prospects and customers can interact with your web site while on the go – quickly and efficiently. In doing so, you will be providing a positive experience for your customers, that will ultimately benefit your company.
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How Mobile Marketing Can Help Small Businesses
Posted on 06. Jul, 2010 by Brian Fluhr in Blog, Mobile Marketing
It’s always exciting when we take the time to discover new case studies and means to present the value of mobile marketing to our clients – especially clients who consider themselves small businesses. Jakob Nielsen is a pioneer in web usability, and hearing him discuss the value of mobile marketing is inspiring to me and I believe beneficial to you. Have a listen to the first five minutes. The last few minutes are largely a commentary on the Ipad.
Nissan Shows Apple iAds Make Advertising Engaging and Cool
Posted on 01. Jul, 2010 by Brian Fluhr in Mobile Advertising
We have been holding our breath as all the hype of iAds and Ipad ads and every other kind of new mobile advertising format’s dust settles. Â However, after seeing the Nissan Leaf iAd – I have to say, I am blown away.
Untitled from Justin Montgomery on Vimeo.
The potential to enable people to actually engage with a mobile ad, beyond just a click is an incredible opportunity for users to immerse themselves with the brand – all from within an application. This accomplishes 3 key goals:
1. The application publisher gets ad revenue
2. The advertiser gets targeted exposure
3. The mobile user gets to experience ads (if they so choose) without having to leave t application they were using.
Very powerful stuff – really – it’s not hype.