Change for the Sake of Change?

Change for the sake of change, or change when it is necessary?    Even the biggest brands often make the mistake of changing their image or product because they feel an apprehended need to adapt to fickle customers’ wants.  There is an old saw that goes “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” but this seems lost on some companies who get overheated by the rush of Social Media Marketing.

A good example is Geico, a US based insurance company.  They have been using the insightful and comedic ads from the Martin Agency for quite some time, with a great deal of success.  The Geico Camel, the Gecko, and a host of other animal inspired ads were their hallmark and their inspiration was the Martin Agency based in New York.  Just for the sake of change, they decided to launch a campaign with a different firm the  IQ Agency of Atlanta, Georgia.  The resulting ads which you can see here (http://tinyurl.com/ok5kf2b) are funny, but not quite the ticket for selling insurance to the common person.  The animals (Camel,  Gecko, etc.) were right on the mark for their product, but “change for the sake of change” will yield them little or no advantage in their market.

McDonalds is an excellent example of change for the sake of ???.  They constantly come up with alterations to the menu based on exhaustive and costly consumer studies and focus groups, which often miss the mark entirely.  Their latest  concoction the ”CBO  burger” is a mystery.  Most people want to go with a brand they know, the product they like, and the service that they are willing to pay for, but the mad dash for Social Media novelty drives even the biggest brands to spend money and risk the loss of clients for the sake of change and often times motivated  by sheer stupidity.

All of this nonsense is not so much the fault of advertisers as it is the fault of the agencies.  In a world of overwhelming analytics and data crunching, they often lose touch with reality.  The desire to be innovative becomes the creation of the just plain weird or fickle.

Every business, large or small, has an innate knowledge of what their customers want or like about their brand.  The trick is in exploiting that in an innovative way, not in rebranding or drastically realigning the pitch.  What must be kept in mind is that the Ad Agencies, particularly in the field of Social Media, are highly competitive and often miss the mark themselves.  In their zeal to sell a new idea to a client, they often forget the truism “Steady as she goes”!  

Roam Business has always worked closely with our clients to determine who and where the potential markets are and how to reach them without a major overhaul of the product or service.   Talking “with”, and not “at”, our clients, is the key to any successful Social Media Marketing campaign.  Contact us for a free consultation www.roambusiness.com .   

Are You Selling Product or Image?

 Any given customer will purchase any given product or service because it provides satisfaction. Sounds simple right? But the secret to providing that satisfaction is in providing that”want” or that satisfaction with the product's utility.

There are many forms of utility,in the language of marketing, but the magic of the successful Social Media Marketer is to provide something called “image” utility. It is the emotional or psychological value that a person relates to a brand or product because of its reputation or social standing.

The beauty of Social Media Marketing is in the way a brand's reputation can be enhanced by friends sharing their perceptions of a product or service with other friends.

Let me give you an example that has to do with a service, rather than a product. A guy, let's call him Joe, has 50 Facebook friends. Joe needs to have his hair cut every two weeks just because that's what Joe likes to do with his hair. A new barber or “hair stylist” has just opened up and Joe has been targeted by a skillful Social Media Marketer who has done his research as someone who should see an ad or two on his Facebook page about the new barber. Remember you aren't selling Joe a haircut, you're selling him an image that will fit the image he wants satisfied. So Joe tries the place out, loves the cut and posts a picture of himself on Facebook with the new look. Most of Joe's 50 friends see the pic and the next thing you know, the barber has two dozen new clients and they're telling their friends about the place.

Now there's a lot more that goes into it from the Social Media Marketers job than it appears in my brief description here. But if the new barber had spent twice as much money on fliers about his new shop as he did on a few well targeted Social Media ads, he would still be looking at an empty chair half the day. Now, he has 50 new clients who are telling their friends about the shop and the Marketer is using his well targeted, image selling ads to draw in even more.

To find out more about image utility, as well as information utility, time utility and form utility you can always contact us at www.roambusiness.com and we will gladly give you a free consultation along with a game plan that includes the most important utility of all “possession utility” where the rubber meets the road and the sale takes place. Knowing how to properly utilize social media platforms to reach your target market is our specialty. Roam Business is a professional Social Media Marketing firm, we don't paper billboards!

Play Ball! (Avoiding the Strikeout)

For those of you familiar with the game of baseball, you will know that the object of the game for the team in the field is to get three “outs” on the batting team as quickly as possible and therefore end their chance of scoring against you in any given inning. The responsibility for doing this falls largely on the shoulders of the Pitcher who will throw as well as he can to get the ball across the plate and have the batter swing at the pitch and miss or simply hit it ineffectively to a fielder who will throw his out with ease. Along with the “slider”, “curve ball” and “change up”, one of the Pitcher's favorite tools is the “fastball” which is a high-speed pitch that causes the batter great difficulty to hit.

Then there is another form of playing ball which is really for fun and allows all the players to loosen up and participate in tossing the ball to one another, not part of the game – just a way to warm up and throw the ball around prior to the game. You may have done this with your friends and called it “playing catch”.

So what does all this have to do with Social Media Marketing? Well you may have noticed that too often a product or service is offered up on Social Media with the heat of a fast ball, trying to get you to swing as quickly as possibly and offering you no chance to pick up the ball and toss it to a friend. I call this the “fast ball” where you barely have chance to hit the damn thing, let alone get a good look at it. Even the biggest companies with the costly ad firms are guilty of this. Then there is the fun game of “catch”, where you are tossed the ball and given a chance to toss it a friend who will toss it to another friend , and so forth. THAT, my dear Social Media Marketeers, is how the game should be played! If you pitch your product and service with a high-speed delivery, ironically you will be the one to strike out, not the intended batter! Toss the ball around and let your friends handle the ball and you will be the winner.

Contact us via our website at www. Roambuisness.com. We love to toss ideas back and forth with our clients – no hardball pitches, just fun with the game! For some tips and laughs about Social Media Marketing, “keep your eye on the ball” and visit our Facebook page at Roam Business on Facebook.

Waking the Spider!

Trends and technology constantly change in Social Media and that is its heartbeat. In a recent interview blogged by Mobile and PrintingCompany,  I made that statement and I stand behind it.

So the follow-up question is clearly, “How does a business adapt to constantly changing trends and technology?” The answer is in the nature of the beast. The world wide web, is precisely that. It is crawled and created by the users who inhabit it. The spider a business wishes to attract will be found in the parlor of that web where the spider most frequently visits. Sounds simple doesn't it? Just find out where your client is and visit him there! But like most simple solutions, the time and effort involved in the task is grossly understated.

Let's go back to the spider crawling the web. The average “spider” has an attention span of under 8 seconds. A simple, concise, vivid message is more likely to attract his/her attention than even the biggest billboard. Because the web is carefully interconnected, a small vibration, in any part of it, is likely to wake the spider and draw its attention.

Keeping in mind that once the spider is engaged, you have very little time to hold its attention, - the second part of the task is embarrassingly obvious. Don't tell the spider what you have to offer, ask the spider what it wants. This involves dialogue and most businesses, however well-intentioned, don't communicate their message effectively in a language that a spider understands.

If this whole analogy baffles you, then you are not in the businesses of advertising your product via social media. Thank God for that, and contact us. For over a decade, Roam Business has been finding corners of the web where even the craftiest spiders have hidden!

RKN

One Size Does Not Fit All

Notwithstanding the numerous magical solutions offered by some Social Media Ad Agencies, there is no one “key” to a successful Social Media Ad Campaign.  Sure, there are plenty of useful applications and sites to use in promoting your product or service, but the simple truth is that each business, even in the same sector, is an individual entity with its own peculiarities.

                Understanding a company’s inner workings is essential to devising a plan to reach and interact with new and existing clients in an efficient and economical way.   Many businesses have thrown wads of cash at “surefire” techniques, only to discover that the platform or application they had invested in was not supportable by their infrastructure or inefficient in reaching their real target market.

                In order to devise a strategy for advertising via Social Media successfully, one must therefore have a very good knowledge of how a specific company functions.  The only real way to achieve this knowledge is to actually have a Social Media Account Manager visit the business and, if necessary, actually spend a few days getting to know the employees and the product a company produces.

                It could be argued that having a Social Media Marketing Department within the company is the obvious solution, but for most small and medium sized businesses the expense of creating such a position is prohibitive.  The task of successfully exploiting the opportunity to fully and economically use Social Media as an advertising tool must therefore be entrusted to an outside agency. 

          
     When choosing an agency for your business, there are a few basic signs to be wary of. 

   

  -      Is the agency offering a variety of platforms and applications to deal with your company’s specific goals or is there simply a “one size fits all” approach?  

  -     Is the agency insistent on a long term (longer than six month) contract?

  -   Will you actually be meeting with a human being, or are you expected to transact business online with a faceless individual?

  -     Is the agency’s representative  willing to offer  you a free personal consultation, outlining a realistic plan for what can and cannot be accomplished in the short, medium and long terms?

There are many capable and trustworthy agencies available, sadly however, there are also sharks in the water.  Exercising due diligence when choosing a Social Media Ad Agency, is as equally important as when dealing with any other vendor.

For a free consultation, contact us via our website at www.roambusiness.com

When the Box is Empty

     So, for the past year all you have been reading about from the Social Media Gurus is that it's all about “content”. Content this, content that, and content is everything . . .

But when is content engaging and when is it just fresh air? Suppose you own a pizzeria. You want to generate buzz about your pizzeria and you have entrusted your best seventeen year old counter person with the task of handling your digital marketing campaign because, hell, why you should you pay a professional to do this stuff. Kids know everything about Social Media, right?

     Here is the high quality content your acne-scarred Social Media Manager has produced for a dynamite post on Facebook, Tumbler, and whatever other channel he likes:

“#Pizza is cool. Everyone knows #pizza is good for you. #Pizza has vegetables. We make the coolest #pizza. Every time you order #pizza, you can get whatever you want on it. We make square #pizzas and round #pizzas. Our #pizza is awesome!”

This post is, of course, accompanied by a really “awesome” picture of a pizza in psychedelic colors.

     Congratulations! You have managed to use the word “pizza” eight times in seven sentences and all those hashtags are going to make this post visible to millions. Folks will be flocking to your pizzeria based on the stimulating content.

     So when the resulting flood of orders for your pizzas doesn't materialize, you tell everyone that Social Media Marketing doesn't work. Thank goodness you didn't pay someone to promote your pizzeria via Social Media. Hell, the kid put up that post a week ago and your sales haven't gone up at all. You are going back to spending a few hundred bucks a month on door-to-door brochures because surely that has been working wonders for your business, not to mention providing the neighborhood with fodder for their recycling boxes.

     Just one last question before you give up on Social Media Marketing. How do you think your customers would react to having your pizza arrive in a box, only to discover that the box was empty? Now start thinking “outside the box” and you might have some glimpse of what your Social Media content should be like. Think outrageous, off-the-wall, bizarre, shocking, tear-jerking, sexy, or just plain different. That is how your content will generate buzz and that is how people will visit your pizzeria to sample your pies. Then consider this: Social Media content is an ongoing conversation. One post a week that elicits no feedback is liking saying “hello” to someone, then walking away before they have had a chance to reply. Let your counter person serve the pizza. Let professionals handle your digital ad campaign.

www.roambusiness.com

RKN 

Trying to be Everywhere for Everyone at Once!

Often, a business will indulge in “overkill” trying to be on every Social Media platform available. There are literally thousands of applications and sites where a business can display their wares, some of them are short lived, others (Facebook for example) are staples.


This advice may seem a little odd coming from Roam Business, since we are on 9 different Social Media Platforms (and still growing!). But it is the nature of our business, Social Media Marketing, to be as available on as many platforms as possible.


The rule of thumb is - “know your audience”. Do a little research and find out what Social platforms they use. The second caveat is - “talk to them, not at them”. You want them to get to know you, you aren't just pitching merchandise. Don't be afraid to try a few different Social networks, but if they don't work, drop them.


Social Media Marketing is a marathon, not a 100 yard dash, It may take time to find and build your audience on the right platform, but the time invested will be worth its weight in loyal followers and excellent references.


Above all, once you have determined your best Social Media outlets, keep your content informative and current. Nothing will lose your followers faster than the same old tired content. Stay on top of current trends in your market and how world affairs affect your product or service. People will enjoy your articles and return for more.


There are many Professional Social Media Marketing firms who will advise you without trying to sell you a “bill of goods” or a long term contract. Roam Business prides ourselves on giving quality, confidential consultations, without any strings attached. Contact us today and we will be pleased to share our expertise with you- because what goes around, usually comes around- and that generally extends to good will.www.roambusinsess.com