When small companies, cash-strapped and with huge setup bills think about marketing, they increasingly look to online marketing. For a lot of people, eMarketing = Free. Unfortunately, it’s not that easy. Online strategies can be a great way to reach customers in a more personal way, building a relationship with them that large corporations often leave out of their massive ad budgets. But online marketing mediums, including the sexiest of them all –social media –are far from free, as I have been learning with an eMarketing plan that I’m designing for a local Vancouver business.
The biggest challenge small businesses face is resources… and I don’t mean just money. Many small companies (under 100 employees) may have a small, if any, marketing team. The marketer may be the owner, and he or she may not be trained to design a marketing plan that can guide the way. The key of success in any marketing communications campaign is in the essentials (which are also the hardest part of all): segmentation, choosing target markets and positioning. These essentials affect all the business, from the product to the pricing and distribution. But it can make or brake advertising and promotions, whether it’s on a billboard or on a Twitter feed.
The second scarce resource is time. Social Media success is a lot harder than people think. There are no rules, and putting too much time and money into wrong strategies can make other aspects of the business (like bad customer service or a faulty product) give you a bad name. In some cases, it can become so big that it can even jump to media, like the "United Breaks Guitars" video on Youtube. That I wrote about in a previous post.
My advice: if you're a small business and thinking of Social Media as a strategy then you need to:
1.) Analyze who your customer (or who different segments are) and what their lives are like. What do they want to talk about or read about? When will they be tuning in?
2.) Make sure your feed engages them in different ways and is not always a sell message, but a conversation about topics that fit your brand and their lives (people want to see tweets that excite them, not buy, buy, buy, as successful strategies by SMBs show)
3.) Make sure you have someone who can spend enough time Tweeting or uploading content to the SM pages and feeds, so that your messages don't get buried in their newsfeed and you keep that online relationship through time. Also, make sure this person can speak "social media" language - that is, casual and in the tone of your audience.
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