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Out of all the different social media platforms available, Twitter has become one of the most popular choices among smart business owners. According to a recent survey from BIA/Kelsey and ConStat, Twitter use among SMBs more than doubled between 2009 through the fourth quarter of 2010 to reach 19 percent. At its current rate, Twitter use among businesses will equal Yellow Page use by the end of the year.
Although a large number of SMBs have signed up, many are still unfamiliar with how to get the most out of it. The following are a few ways business owners can leverage Twitter in their social media marketing campaigns.
Show some personality
Twitter can be a powerful way to show your company’s unique culture and strengthen your brand. Posting interesting and entertaining things will make your company seem more friendly and accessible to your customers and prospects. Try sharing humorous stories, or links to interesting articles that relate to your industry. You can even customize your Twitter background to reflect your personality even more.
Twitter background inspiration
Offer people something
Give people a reason to follow you. Give free advice, answer questions, conduct a contest where the 20th reply gets something for free, give a discount, etc. The key is not to talk AT people, but to talk WITH them. Using Twitter Search (link to search.twitter.com), you can search keywords related to your industry, and engage with people asking questions. They will see you as an expert, and are more likely to refer others to you.
Moonfruit case study: Laptop giveaway boosts Twitter traffic by 1000 percent
Drive traffic
Make sure to provide links in your tweets back to your website, blog, online store, press releases, or whatever else you want people to click on. Problogger.net’s Darren Rowse has had success driving blog traffic by tweeting a question and including a link to his blog. “Instead of telling your Twitter audience that you’ve published a new post, ask them their opinion on the core topic you’ve covered,” says Rowse. “Asking a question engages your Twitter followers and solicits their experience.” The more followers you have, the more likely it is that at least some of them will click through. Additionally, the more followers you have, the better the odds are that your tweet will get re-tweeted, giving you even more exposure.
Follow relevant users
A big mistake that many users make is trying for quantity over quality when it comes to who they follow. While it might not matter for the average user, savvy business owners should concentrate on targeting who they follow. You want to build relationships with people in your target area that are likely to purchase your products/services. An event marketing company in Denver is not very likely to receive business from a 9-year-old in New York who is tweeting about his favorite video games. Again, the search feature is a great way to find quality connections.
Make sure people know of your profile outside of Twitter
You can’t efficiently build a Twitter following if nobody knows about your profile. Post links to your Twitter page on your Facebook profile, your website, your blog, your email signature, or anywhere else where people outside of Twitter might see it. Post your Twitter handle in your storefront window, or your promotional flyers. The more creative you can get, the more people will remember you.
Simply put, social media is all about interacting and building relationships. Combining the above five simple techniques while making your tweets interesting, relevant, and friendly, will go a long way to improve the effectiveness of your social media marketing campaigns.
Follow Kutenda on Twitter @kutenda
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In the persuasion game, priming is the innocuous first move. The seemingly innocuous move, that is.
Colleen Jones, marketer and author of Clout: the Art and Science of Influential Web Content, defines priming as “introducing words, images, or ideas now to influence people’s choices a little later.”
Priming is a staple of effective marketing, and is particularly important if:
• you sell complex products or services
• you have a long sales cycle
• you have a resistant/cynical audience
• your market isn’t fully defined or mature
• you have an expensive product
• you need to establish a high degree of trust
• you don’t have an established relationship with the prospect
Priming is an exercise in subtlety and restraint, but it can be brutally effective all the same. Consider this example Jones cites in Clout: one of the best ways to encourage people to vote is to ask them, the day before the election, if they plan on voting. This simple question boosts the likelihood a person will vote by 25 percent! It acts as a powerful nudge that the recipient cannot even detect.
In push-polls, a less benign form of priming is used. A partisan pollster might ask what sounds like an innocuous question or present a damning hypothetical scenario, such as, ‘If you knew candidate X finished a pot of coffee without brewing another one, would be you less likely to vote for him?’ The facts are immaterial: the pollster is simply creating a tie in the voter’s mind between candidate X and antisocial behavior. Believe it or not, push-polls actually work (and are often as ridiculous as my example).
Whether it’s black hat or white hat in nature, priming allows you to maintain an air of objectivity while planting a seed (e.g. data backup is important) that you’ll cultivate later with more overt, less-partial messaging (e.g. our data backup plan is tops). It is a setting of the stage that masters in rhetoric and human psychology use often. (Socrates was the master.)
Sometimes priming is so subtle it doesn’t seem like priming at all. For example, here at Kutenda, our sales team swears by a very simple but proven strategy for engaging prospects: write a short, casual email to with a link to an interesting article or site. It doesn’t have to relate to work. As long as it will resonate.
How is this priming?
Remember, priming is about planting an idea, feeling or association. By sending an interesting article, you’re telling the prospect that you are a source of interesting information. Do this a couple times and you can set up a Pavlovian response: you send, they read, you send, they read. Rinse and repeat until the email contains a call to action!
If all of this sounds very calculating, that’s because it is! Assuming you’re confident in your product and truly believe it has value, you shouldn’t feel sheepish about using basic human psychology to advance your cause.
Kevin Brown, VP of Kutenda
One of the leading providers of business management to the IT industry, Autotask–together with Kutenda, will host a free webinar offering how-to leverage the In-house IT opportunity with SMB clients, on June 21st, 2011 at 1:00pm ET.
The webinar is for IT professionals interested in leveraging the In-House IT opportunity with SMB clients. It will discuss why In-House IT is a lucrative opportunity, and how to get your foot in the door. If you would like to register please visit:
‘Attack and Conquer the In-House IT Opportunity!’
Presented by Len DiCostanzo, Sr. VP, Dean of Autotask Academy at Autotask Corporation, and Kevin Brown, Vice President at Kutenda, the webinar will teach participants:
- What IT topics SMBs constantly think
- How to approach SMBs about solving their problems with your IT solutions
- How to make the case for SMBs to outsource IT functions
- The MSP sales process and why it is important to nurture prospects over time
- Actionable tactics you can use to put these insights to work – proven by an IT veteran!
‘Attack and Conquer the In-House IT Opportunity!’ is a free webinar on Tuesday, June 21st, 2011 at 1:00PM ET by Autotask Corporation and Kutenda.
To register, or to learn more, visit:
‘Attack and Conquer the In-House IT Opportunity!’
For the most part, managed services is a local business. The majority of MSP’s operate with almost all of their business coming from within 30 miles or so of their office.
And for good reason.
Although service delivery can now be done anywhere fairly easily – given the availability of remote control tools and networks of contractors – the sales and marketing of managed services is still more easily done on a local basis. Getting referrals, meeting people in person, etc. – all easier locally.
Even though most MSP’s are focused on their local markets, many are still ignoring one of the most important factors in getting found locally – having a local domain name.
What do I mean by a local domain name?
Local domain names are domains that include some reference to your market, such as BostonITSupport or ITSupportBoston. Instead, most MSPs tend to buy domain names that stress some particularly technology or their brand name. I did this for years at Everon, without ever taking advantage of local domain names.
Big mistake.
Why such a big mistake? I’ll give you two reasons:
- Ease of getting ranked - it is far easier to get a local domain name ranked for a local business than it is to get a non-local domain name ranked. I’ve tested this and proved it over and over again, having achieved first page ranking in competitive markets in a week or two. This, of course, is not always the case – and is ultimately up to the search engines – but my experience is that generally it’s the rule.
- Rate of conversion from search to opportunity – this is the BIG reason. I was shocked to find in my analytics report how much higher “local” searches were converting to inbound leads versus “non-local” searches. I’ll provide some data to illustrate.
As you may know, I’ve spent a lot – well over half of a million dollars – marketing managed services online via Google AdWords and other platforms. I’ve also done a ton of optimization and content building for my sites to make sure they show up organically.
Thanks to the beauty of analytics, I’ve been able to run reports to see which keyword searches actually convert into good prospects and eventually paying customers. Here is what I found:
For my top performing non-local keyword searches – phrases like IT Support, IT Services, etc. – I had an average conversion rate of right about 2.7%
Now get this – for my top performing local keyword searches – phrases like IT Support Boston and IT Support Denver, etc. – I had an average conversion rate of about 53.77%
My local search terms convert at about 20 X the rate of my non-local search terms!!!
Talk about an eye-opener! It makes sense – people searching locally are clearly demonstrating the intent to find someone local to work with, so they take action when they find a good match in the search engine. Those using non-local terms are most likely much earlier in the buy cycle and not as focused on finding a short term solution.
If you aren’t using local domain names to get ranked for local search terms, you are missing a big opportunity.
Mike
PS – If you are a MSP that sells EHR services, or a physician shopping for EMR software for your practice, make sure you check out Electronic Medical Records Companies, a new informational site from Kutenda.
One of the conversations I have often with MPS’s is getting them to understand the cost of getting a new lead in the managed services business. Expectations vary across the board quite wildly:
Some believe a lead shouldn’t cost more than $25.
Others believe $2500 is ok, because they close 100% of the people they get in front of (oh yes…I hear this one. I also hear that you’ve NEVER lost a client).
Both of these expectations are way off. You WILL NOT acquire leads that cheaply in this industry, and you WILL NOT close 100% of the prospects you get in front of. This is an important thing for you to get your hands around, as you can’t possibly plan on building a scalable business without understanding what a normal sales and marketing pipeline looks like.
So what does it cost to acquire new leads and customers in the managed services business? My experience in the business – which includes having spent well into the seven figures on sales and marketing – has consistently resulted in the following:
New leads: $175-275 per lead
New customers: $1,500-2500 per customer
A report I read recently suggests that the average cost per lead for a broad swath of industries is $143-373 per lead, so I don’t think my experience is far off.
Keep in mind, that this is a measure of leads/customers per ACTIVE marketing dollar I am spending, as in money spent on actual campaigns, advertisements, direct mail, telesales reps, etc. This DOES NOT include the dollars that I spent on internal marketing personnel, tools, etc.
The good news for everyone is that these are perfectly fine numbers for building a great business in this industry! Customers in this industry are very valuable, so these numbers clearly work in your business model.
The problems comes when you believe that you should be acquiring leads and customers much more cheaply than this. If you fool yourself, you will not make the necessary investment in marketing and sales to acquire customers as quickly as your competition. Believe me when I tell you that there are now plenty of sophisticated operators in the managed services business that will gladly spend these amounts all day long, and are eating your market share for lunch.
Here are common ways I hear MSP’s fool themselves:
- I grow my business 100% from referrals, so leads don’t cost me anything. Actually, they are costing you a ton. You are not growing nearly as quickly as you could, and your “non-investment” model will put a cap on your total growth potential. Every business has a cost of acquiring new leads and customers – yours is not the exception.
- I got three leads and didn’t close a deal, the leads were bad. Perhaps they were “bad”, if there is such a thing. Statistically, you will probably only sell about 1 out of 10 leads you get. That’s not “bad”, that’s the normal sales pipeline. If your numbers are worse than 1 out of 10, it’s much more likely that you need sales training than it is that all of those leads are “bad”…FYI.
- I closed the customer, but they only did $700 in business with us this month, so it wasn’t worth it. Again, you probably need more sales training and a better plan to follow up with these customers. Not everyone signs a big recurring revenue contract the day they meet you – put a follow up plan in place and build trust over time!
In the direct marketing industry, they teach you that knowing your cost per lead and cost per customer are two of the fundamental numbers you must understand about your business and your industry. Otherwise, you will never really know whether you are on track or not versus the competition.
Same goes for the managed services industry – know your numbers if you want to compete!
Mike
