This begins a series of posts for small business owners, startups and B2B marketers that are new to using social media to grow their companies. Or, are ready to reconsider established marketing tactics and look for new ways to achieve customer and business growth.
Every dollar and every minute you spend on marketing tactics is for one purpose:
business growth! If you’re not satisfied with the growth from your current marketing tactics you’ll want to explore new options for attracting prospects. That’s what I’ll be posting about in the coming weeks.
According to Gary Vaynerchuk, venerable social media entrepreneur, blogger, successful retailer, WineLibrary expert, and author of the best seller Crush It! ,
Maybe you’re thinking about the best marketing tactics to give your small business a strong start this year. I’m not a formal New Year resolutions maker, but I do think about what can I do better. Maybe as a small business owner you’re thinking the same thing. So when I think what is maybe the one goal that most small business folks have in common?
Grow by winning more customers!
Maybe your business growth plan this year is focused on winning new customers. Or, increasing your sales to existing customers. Or getting more prospects to your website so you can convert them to customers.
December 28th, 2009 by Cynthia Trevino | Filed in Social Media
Gary Vaynerchuk, the New York Times/Wall St. Journal best-selling author of “Crush It! Why Now is the Time to Cash in on Your Passion” is a savvy businessperson that every entrepreneur, small business owner, marketer, CEO, etc. can learn from.
He’s raised the business use of blogging, online video, and Twitter to an art form. He’s mastered social media as a method to reach out to customers, engage them and sell them products they love, like few others have.
Gary stopped by Carlsbad, CA (my hometown) a few weeks ago, thanks to Loren Sanders. Loren Sanders owns North San Diego County-based Coastal Home Finder.
Gary Vaynerchuk, Nov. 4, 2009, Carlsbad, CA
Gary’s Story
If you haven’t heard about Gary Vaynerchuk, the short version is that he was a child-entrepreneur who taught himself to turn a profit selling baseball cards. He then turned his family’s New Jersey wine retail store into a multi-million dollar operation. I won’t waste space with how many blog readers, @garyvee followers and Wine Library TV viewers Gary has now. Check out Wine Library TV episode number 792 here .
The 140-page Crush It! is a guide not to just social media, but contains the code to doing business successfully in our Web-centric economy. Gary speaks volumes to any businessperson that has a passion for their company, product or service.
How Service-now.com is Beating the Goliath(s) in the IT Management Software Space
Shannon Free-Cleveland, UCSD Extension, Matt French & Rhett Glauser of Service-now.com (San Diego, Dec. 3, 2009)
Does your small B2B business have a great story to tell and no one is listening?
Are your primary B2B lead generation tools cold calling and large (pricey) industry events?
Do you have more than 1 mention each month by your industry analysts/influencers? Less than 1 mention each month?
If so, you’re where Service-now.com was about two years ago with their marketing efforts. Think: small team, small budget. You may benefit from reviewing a presentation made at a recent Marketing Boot Camp I put together for the TechAmerica San Diego Sales & Marketing Roundtable.
Service-now.com is the industry’s first IT management software as a service (SaaS) provider. Two years ago the small startup company’s marketing efforts were not increasing visibility and awareness for the Service-now.com brand. Service-now’s then 2-person marketing team dug in and tried new marketing tactics like content marketing using webinars, Twitter to drive attendance at webinars, blogging to keep customers and prospects informed and more.
The results? Service-now.com has nearly doubled annual revenues to north of $35 million, has won 335 of the world’s biggest companies as customers, and has over 130 employees. And the marketing team is all the way up to 4 folks.
Erik Qualman has done for social media what the Freakonomics guys have done for recent social history and economics. In case you missed it, his video below is insightful, entertaining and eye-opening.
In his video Qualman asks, “Is Social Media a Fad or the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?”
If you’re a small business owner that is still sitting on the sidelines of social media marketing, watching this video is a wise use of 4 minutes.
Best quote: “We no longer search for news–it finds us. In the near term we won’t search any longer for products and services–they will find us via social media”
My favorite small business-impacting stats from the video:
- If Facebook were a country it would be the 4th largest (China, India, US, Facebook)
- 25% of search results on world’s top 20 largest brands are links to User Generated Content
- 34% of the world’s 200,000,000 bloggers post opinions about products and brands
- For most brands, their social graph is a more important ranking than their rank on Google
Read Erik Qualman’s list of statistic sources here. The 180+ blog post comments are interesting too.
Are your small business products and services ready to be found via social media?
cynthiatrevino
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If your small business is looking for ways to increase the number of web visitors—as most of us are—here are seven content marketing ideas. The secret to being found online is a web site updated with an ongoing supply of fresh, relevant content when your prospects are searching for solutions.
Before you can Tweet your way to successful marketing and sales, you’ll want to publish lots of valuable content. Content that sets you apart from your competitors.
Content Marketing Tactics:
Create original, relevant content that attracts your prospects. Invest time in asking your customers and prospects about their information needs. What kinds of answers/how-to’s/tips are they having trouble finding online? What are their favorite information sites when problem solving? Do they use online forums? Blogs? Trade publication sites? When do they use print sources? More content ideas here.
For B2B companies looking for social media suggestions from other business owners, here are 5 suggestions from a startup. T. Brian Jones, President and Founder of IndustrialInterface.com shares key recommendations from his recent successful experience using social media here.
He and his partners have gone from a brand new startup site a few months ago to 20,000 site visitors in October. Brian explains how they have increased web site visitors Read the rest of this entry »
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I am always on the hunt for B2B examples of successful social media marketing tactics. IndustrialInterface.com provides sales referrals and matching between engineers and suppliers. The new company is using social media marketing to grow their small business.
If you’re marketing and selling to a technical customer, you’ll be interested in how startup company IndustrialInterface.com is creating and sharing valuable content. The interview below with T. Brian Jones, President & Founder
of Industrial Interface, offers key insights. Read on to find out how they are building their brand online using blogging, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Brian: It’s not always about marketing. Internet users can smell marketing speak a mile away. Why? Because Read the rest of this entry »
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Small business owners are busy juggling the slow/mixed economy, staying competitive and marketing and selling their products and services. Blog Action Day is a reminder that we must add to our to-do lists: making a contribution to the welfare of the environment.
We all know we need to do more to help the planet and lessen the impacts of climate change in our own small and big ways. The challenge for me (and you?) is what more can we do? If we’re already driving less (more calls), working to go paperless in our offices, following all recycling rules…
What are other small businesses doing? Here in California, the State has a program awarding small businesses with outstanding contributions to being green.
Nomad Cafe won an award for actually, proactively eliminating waste. They also waste reduction programs save the business over $12,000 (green dollars) per year. How cool green is that?! BTW: Nomad is a small cafe in Oakland, CA offering fair trade coffee and locally sourced food. Christopher Waters, owner, has been green since opening in 2003.
Christopher Waters, Nomad Cafe, Image: CoolCalifornia.org
Small Company Big Image blog is a resource for small businesses & marketers that want to use new media to generate leads and grow their companies, by Cynthia Trevino.
Brian: It’s not always about marketing. Internet users can smell marketing speak a mile away. Why? Because 
Nomad Cafe
