strategies

Top 7 Big Marketing Essentials for 2013

This is a guest post from Feather Hickox.

The average consumer receives over 16,000 marketing messages each day. Marketers face a daunting challenge to break through that volume of noise.

This challenge has given rise to Big Marketing ? the use of Big Data analytics to develop personalized marketing messages and offers on a massive scale.

Based on my team?s work with many of the largest retailers in the world, we?ve compiled a list of seven essentials for turning Big Data into effective, profitable and highly targeted Big Marketing campaigns.

Social Media Marketing Success Doesn?t Have To Be A Hunt For A Four-Leaf Clover

This is a guest post by Stacey Acevero.

The rise of social media has created all sorts of new opportunities for small business marketers to get the word out, but it has presented challenges too.

The days of sending press releases to media outlets with the hopes of being lucky enough to get some coverage are long gone, morphing into constant opportunities to catch the next social media sharing phenomenon.

Today, it?s not enough to hit just those traditional media outlets.

You need to create a social media survival kit to help your business? content fly on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and countless niche sites across the digital horizon.

Take heart, shareable content is not as rare (or hard to create) as you might think. With just a few tweaks, your content could be the talk of the sharing community.

Try these four tips to help make your press releases more social media friendly:

Understand your audiences.?You?ve heard it before: make sure you are writing content geared toward your audience. Before you can write for them, you must understand who makes up that group. It?s more than just the specific prospects you are trying to appeal to; search engines are your readers too.?This is where search engine optimization comes in. Make your content highly rank-able with optimized keywords and phrases. The computerized audiences will love them ? but don?t forget that your primary readers are still human.

Provide opportunities for sharing. Incorporate buttons that will allow readers to share on a number of networks. You may have thought of Facebook, Twitter and good-old-fashioned email, but you should also include sites such as:

Tumblr
StumbleUpon
Digg
Delicious
Reddit

Making your content easy and compelling to share is just one more way to motivate readers to spread your word.

Tap into viral trends. All those videos, photographs and jingles floating across the web are making the rounds for a reason.?? Take a look at the top memes (virally spread ideas) and ask yourself, what can I do to make my content more playful, provocative or just plain different?

You may find that a simple video aimed at a niche site is the crux to a viral campaign that spreads to networks everywhere.

Use your press release as a palette. Don?t think of your press release solely as a way to get out information. Put creativity into every element of your template by adding videos and photos to make the complete piece better positioned for social media marketing success.

Experiment with quirky or bold headlines
Use subtitles that ask questions or identify different takes on your topic
Use links, multimedia and photos to tell your story

Stay away from PR speaks; nobody has the time or interest to read it. Write like a storyteller and remember, there are millions of speed-readers on the net who skim content to determine readability.

Find a way to appeal to these scanners in an instant so they won?t just finish your press release, they?ll want to share it as well.

Think about the content you?ve been motivated to share. What about it drives you to let others in on the treasure you?ve found?

Translate that to your press release. If it?s important,? interesting and valuable, then with a few touch-ups you can make it eminently shareable too.

Shareable = Social Media Marketing Success!

So, your turn – how are you finding success in social media? Let’s hear your best practices below!

About the author:?Stacey Acevero is the social media community manager of PRWeb, where she engages the online community through PRWeb social channels such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn daily with articles and conversation about PR, small businesses, SEO, social media and more. She is all about creative social media marketing ideas as well as building the PRWeb brand. Stacey also pens of some of PRWeb?s case studies. Connect with Stacey on Twitter at @SaceVero.?

Putting the I in Social Media

Whenever I used to meet with a potential new client that was interested in a social media program, I always used to take a piece of paper with a little drawing on it.

The surprise on their faces was always entertaining when they’d ask for my ideas for them, and instead of presenting a huge multi-slide PowerPoint, I’d show them this piece of paper and the four words on it.

The reason for keeping it simple was simplicity itself – if they couldn’t see the benefit of each point, they probably couldn’t see the benefit of social media.

I’ve since upgraded that piece of paper a little, but the message of the four points on it still works today.

Identify

There are so many different social media tools and applications that it can often be like trying to work your way around a maze. So many different turns to take, easy to get lost with all the options available ? which is why it?s important to take the time to identify what will work for you. Decide what you want from social media and then use the appropriate tools.?

Identity

Having an easily identifiable brand is key for anyone both online and off. Although this is usually applicable to business, personal branding offers an invaluable way of building a reputation as someone to go to for a certain niche. So your identity should be the same across whatever platforms you use ? from bio, to profile, to picture, to logo ? keeping the same identity across social media platforms will help people remember you more easily.

Invest

There?s an old saying that says, ?You get out of it what you put into it.? While this can be used for most topics, it?s particularly true of social media. It?s not something you can dip into now and again ? it changes too fast for that. Instead, to really see the fruits of your labour, you need to invest time into it.

A big part of social media is all about building relationships ? and just like relationships in real life, the best ones take time to foster. Use this mindset with social media, place proper investment into it, and you?ll see the benefits fall into place.

Interact

It may seem an obvious thing to say, but there are only two words in social media and one of them is social. Yet still so many people ? businesses, usually, more than individuals ? are missing this key fact. Instead of simply broadcasting yourself, interact with the community and actively take part in social media.

Read and comment on blogs, both inside and outside your niche; converse on Twitter instead of just spamming your latest blog post or affiliate deal; share helpful news with people instead of keeping it to yourself for your own benefit.

Social media can often be a difficult thing to navigate, with different uses for different people. One thing it is to everyone, though, is a wonderful opportunity for all parts of you or your client’s business.

How are you helping others understand their opportunities?

photo credit: Eva the Weaver