In many ways, the advent of social selling has changed how we do business.
Gone are the days of faceless organizations.
Now, businesses rely on getting and maintaining the good will of their customers in order to make a sale.
How do businesses do this?
By harnessing the power of social selling and driving sales from the inside out. That is, entering its customers’ social circles in order to become a trusted brand for goods and services.
Let’s take a look at social selling and how you can ethically increase sales and engage with your customers.
What Is Social Selling?
To know you’re doing social selling ethically, you first need to understand what the term means.
Social selling, or social commerce, is using online social networks and tools to reach customers and engage them in a sale.
It’s a bit of a balancing act: Get it right and you’ve earned yourself a pleased customer who is likely to share his positive experience. Get it wrong and you’ve invaded someone’s personal network and abused his or her trust in a way they are not likely to forget. – Social Selling: How to Ethically Reach your Followers and Drive Sales by Kieran Flanagan
Social Selling: How to Ethically Reach your Followers and Drive Sales
The Simple Template for a Thorough Content Style Guide
Content creation is central to your inbound marketing success, but as your volume of written content increases, inconsistencies are also bound to arise. Whether due to lack of clarity in your own head about the style with which you want to write, or disjointed communication across the content creators in your organization, failure to decide upon and document accepted editorial guidelines is a recipe for inconsistent messaging and an incoherent brand experience.
That’s why most companies that rely on content as a central part of their marketing strategy develop an editorial style guide. When creating an editorial style guide, you’re not discussing the operations of content creation — like editorial calendaring or search engine optimization of content — nor are you going into the detail of a brand style guide like the nitty gritty on visual style and use of your logo. Rather, your editorial style guide will guide writers by providing a set of standards to which they must adhere when creating content for your website, eliminating confusion, guess work, and debates over what boils down to a matter of editorial opinion among grammar and content geeks. – The Simple Template for a Thorough Content Style Guide by Corey Eridon
How to Handle Criticism: a Practical Guide
As bloggers, each of us has to deal with criticism. Blogging is a very public activity—almost all of us has the goal of gaining readers to our blogs—and the more people you reach, the more likely it is that you’ll hear criticisms.
“You’re wrong…”
“How can you say that? You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I couldn’t disagree more…”
“This is the last time I read this blog!”These are just some of the criticisms bloggers regularly face—I’ve received versions of all of these many times over the years, and if you’ve been blogging for any length of time, they’re probably fairly familiar to you, too.
Criticism can be deeply painful. As I explained here, the difficulty in dealing with criticism caused Elizabeth Taylor to ignore everything the press said about her. The discomfort of being criticised has led more than one blogger to shut down their blog, so it’s an issue that bloggers really do need to think about.
How can we manage criticism, not get dragged down by it, and maybe even benefit from it?
Embrace criticism?!
That probably sounds a little odd, but the first thing you need to do is accept—even embrace—the fact that your blog has attracted criticism.
I know that can be difficult to do, but think of it this way: you’re a blogger, and you’re tackling the tough job of putting yourself, your work, and your opinions on the line every week.
Not everyone will agree with you all of the time, but negative feedback is a sign that you’re making people think. After all, that’s one of the most common reasons why many start blogging in the first place. – How to Handle Criticism: a Practical Guide by Darren Rowse
Certainly, few bloggers are ever going to gleefully greet negative emails and comments the way we do positive feedback, but the first step in using that information positively is to accept it as a natural part of blogging.
Top Internet strategy, marketing and technology links for the week of February 4, 2012
Here are the top Internet strategy, marketing and technology links for the week of February 4, 2012…
- Infographic: How To Get More Twitter Traffic (Digital Buzz Blog)
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Four Tips for Generating Leads With Email (MarketingProfs)
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Blogs Top List of Social Media Investments for 2012(MarketingProfs)
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Frustrated by Blogger’s Block? Try this Exercise! (ProBlogger)
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Benchmarking Your Social Performance (Social Media Explorer)
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Why Blogging Isn’t Growing Your Business (and What to Do About It)(Marketing Trenches)
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Affiliate Marketing: Segmenting Your Affiliates (Practical eCommerce)
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Getting The Most Out of Great Content in Social Media (Social Media Explorer)
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The Super Simple Guide to Using and Marketing Through Pinterest – Part One (Search Engine Guide)
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Perception is Worth 1,001 Words(Search Engine Guide)
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Three Ways to Make Your Content Search-Friendly (Marketing Profs)
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6 Ways To Get More B2B Leads From Social Media (Social Fresh)
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Why You Want To Be the Last Blog Standing(Outspoken Media)
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SEO: Are You Relevant, or Are You Vital?(Small Business Search Marketing)
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Changes and challenges for email marketers in 2012: report (eConsultancy)
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SEO: Are You Relevant, or Are You Vital?
Relevant web pages. Relevant title tags. Relevant meta descriptions. Relevant copywriting. You’ve heard it a million times, right? I’m guilty of talking about relevance to pretty much every SEO client I’ve ever had.
No more. Relevancy is overrated. Anybody can be relevant; just throw a keyword on the web page a few times and BAM! You’re relevant.
You want to do better than that. And what’s better than being relevant?
Being vital.
SEO Quality Scale
If you think about an SEO quality scale, there’s nothing better than being vital.
I’d never suggest that a small business owner take everything Google says about SEO as the gospel truth, but I think it’s wise to look at and think about how Google classifies web pages. – SEO: Are You Relevant, or Are You Vital? by Matt McGee
Perception is Worth 1,001 Words
In the world of business, marketing and advertising is everything. Marketing is at least as important as the products or services you sell. Without marketing, you have no one to demonstrate the superiority of what you offer!
There is a reason people build businesses in cities surrounded by people, rather than in a desert surrounded by cactus! You need people to market to, and you need customers coming in your door. The success of your business relies on how well you market your product or service first, and second by how well you deliver it. Very few businesses survive on word of mouth alone. But what many small business owners fail to realize is that while marketing is everything, everything you do is marketing!- Perception is Worth 1,001 Words by Stoney deGeyter
Why Blogging Isn’t Growing Your Business (and What to Do About It)
I joined a couple other B2B Marketers for a meal a few weeks ago, and the topic of content marketing and blogging came up. This came as no surprise – I know they occasionally read our blog and can see that we are passionate on the topic. They recounted some of their challenges with blogging, including some common challenges:
- Getting content from subject matter experts, when these experts are also required to focus their energy on billable hours
- Occasional missed deadlines and the need to build a backlog of content before this happens
- Varying levels of commitment from different authors
While I’ve seen many companies experience some or all of these challenges at one point or another, as I listened and started to ask questions I realized what was happening to them – blogging had become hard because they weren’t getting anything back from it. The above challenges really were just addressable symptoms presenting themselves from the larger malady – they hadn’t established a content strategy that showed them direct return on investment from their blogging efforts.
They needed Better Content, Not Just More Content—this broke down in to three main areas:
We Don’t Know What They Want to Know About
Simply put, my colleagues didn’t know what their audience was looking for anymore. I think each of us at one time or another has hit a temporary wall when it comes to content ideas, but in this case they were really stuck. Initially they turned to their Analytics, but there was no clear indication of the types of posts that performed better than others. The solution here was easy – go back to the basics of why you are ultimately blogging for your business. – Why Blogging Isn’t Growing Your Business (and What to Do About It) by Will Davis
The Rockstar You Need to Hire to Manage Your Blog
At this stage in the game, you know blogging is a crucial element to the success of your inbound marketing. But that doesn’t mean you’re doing it consistently like you know you should.
Why don’t marketers and business owners find time to blog even when they know how important it is to meeting their marketing goals? Because blogging takes time you don’t have; you don’t fancy yourself a great writer; you can’t think of good topics on a regular basis; or any of the other myriad reasons people don’t blog when they know they should.
That’s why more and more marketers are turning to hiring an employee dedicated solely to blogging in order to keep their blog fed with top-notch content on a consistent basis. The problem is, the job title “Blogger” is relatively new, and as such, it’s hard to know what exactly you should be looking for when hiring someone to blog for you. Luckily, we’ve hired more than one blogger in our day. So we thought it would be helpful to share the qualities to look for when hiring a blogger for your company — whether freelance, part time, contract, or full time.
Writing Ability
Let’s get the most obvious one out of the way. A blogger should obviously be a great writer, but blogging is very different than writing a book, a grant, or even marketing copy. Your blogger must excel at explaining complex concepts through short form content, and be clear and concise so your audience finds the content helpful. While applicants who excel in other forms of content creation may also be fantastic bloggers, those qualifications don’t necessarily mean they can also blog. – The Rockstar You Need to Hire to Manage Your Blog by Corey Eridon
Launching a Social Command Center (Without The Center)
“Social command centers” are all the rage today and it’s not without some merit. Many organizations now find themselves in a real-time business environment where news travels faster than sound, and information is set free. As a result, some forward thinking companies have put “monitoring” in place either in-house or in combination with partners. This isn’t enough.
And to make matters worse, I’ve seen companies make the classic mistake of buying a tool BEFORE putting any thought into the design that goes into effective monitoring and response, forgetting the 3P’s (People, Process, Platforms). Tech platforms are only one third of the problem.
The media hasn’t helped. “Social Command Centers” as physical spaces ripped from the playbook of NASA have been documented via Dell, Gatorade and most recently, the Super Bowl. Now, to be clear—a physical space can make listening, engaging and responding in real time effective—but it’s not a requirement. In fact, for the organization who wishes to be able to function in real time for the long haul, it’s the wrong place to focus on. So, how does any organization who wishes to be better equipped for real-time business move forward? Based on some of the work I’ve been doing with our analytics teams at Edelman Digital—below are some high level recommendations for setting up your social command center, without the center. – Launching a Social Command Center (Without The Center) by David Armano
Digital Marketing & Strategy
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