Social Media Marketing
Trigger Types And Effects |
Even in our revolving door strategies, we’re guiding the prospect through a step by step cyclical process of launching using mental triggers to help prospects make their buying decision based on impulse or need, or a combination of both.
Sometimes when you are online, you’ve already made up your mind to make the purchase and have the urgency of buying right away. This is sort of like an impulse buying decision when you are not looking for information about the product and price isn’t an issue. You want it NOW. Like if you have decided you want to go to a new city for New Years with friends who have already booked. Someone raises the concern that the whole city is booked out, that you may not be able to get accommodation. You jump online with the intention of booking the first place you find. Your credit card is on the keyboard, price is not an issue at all, the only thing on your mind is, please God, let there be a bed. Now you may book the first bed you find without ever knowing how many other beds were available. It didn’t matter to you when in this mind set. On any other day you will have shopped around for the best deal…
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Where To Find Affiliate Partners |
You can find affiliate partners via the following:
1- Through Blog searches on search engines (like Google.com) or through Technorati.com
2- Through Twitter user directories, such as twellow.com or twitterly.com
3- Through an affiliate database of event promoters at Eventslisted.com
4- Through Toplinked.com, a service that provides us with lists of members with open gates on LinkedIn - i.e. LinkedIn people who are open to networking with anyone. They send these lists off for a low price/month, which is almost nothing compared to the value that you get. It helps add a huge number of people to your contacts in one go (without any restrictions or limits)
5- By getting involved in Q&A platforms on LinkedIn and Yahoo Groups. It’s one of the best ways of interacting with experts in the domain and getting in touch with them on a mutual ground.
6- By joining Facebook Groups and getting in touch with members of those groups. There is no restriction to the number of groups you can join.
7- Through commenting on other blogs.
8- Forums are another great place to network to find affiliates, since like-minded people tend to group together on forums.
9- You can use the Gorilla Marketing strategies that we discussed earlier to find partners on Facebook.
10- ‘Click Bank’ is an affiliate broker for software and information products. If you want people in that domain, you can use this resource…
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Affiliate Marketing |
You can form partnerships with other website owners who have an established list of prospects, leads or customers or who simply get a lot of traffic to their site or blog. They can promote your products or events by sending visitors into your sales funnel by leveraging their networks. These people are called affiliates (or affiliate partners) because through a partnership they become affiliated with your business.
To track the commissions and manage traffic coming in from different affiliate partners, you can assign unique links to each affiliate. Events Listed has these tracking capabilities built into it allowing event marketers to build a list of partners (affiliates) who can all build their own second tier networks on our platform.
Promoting in this way helps increase outreach. Affiliates do marketing for you and bring you more visitors; this gives a boost to the income and makes everyone happy. It sounds simple enough but needs business savvy and effort on your part.
a- It is essential that you maintain uninterrupted communication with your venture partners and affiliates. You have to build a relationship with them and win their trust. Your main focus while communicating with them should be to convey what is in it for them. Don’t make it all about you. These people are a very important inner community within your greater business community…
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Leveraging Thought Leaders |
Authority bloggers and original thought leaders gather a lot of attention in the social media landscape. Just like in real life, you look up to those people whom you think have a lot to offer; the online crowds are easily moved by prominent online figures. When Michael Arrington says something good about a tech startup, thousands of people visit the tech startups site. When Robert Scoble predicts something about the industry, heated discussions on that topic all across the blogosphere begin.
If certain people have so much influence, you can ride off their backs (metaphorically) to get your word out forward. You can befriend them on Facebook and Friendfeed where you can introduce your launch pages or blog posts - thus leading their followers to your sites. You can shadow them by posting comments on their posts when they post and commenting when they comment on other blog’s just so they see you as a positive contributor in the same conversations as they.
Once you are in their scope you can contact them and ask to interview them. I always prefer a written email interview on first approach as its less demanding, thus less of a decision for them to have to make. You can send them a set of questions and have them email back answers that you can publish. They will usually say yes for ego sake, and will link to their interview giving you link juice. You get link juice, rankings, traffic & credibility…
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Inside Scoop |
When you post videos to Youtube you need to optimize the video first by adding the right title and tags. The best tactic to get this right is to search Youtube with the same phrase you want to rank for. Simply open the number one video and copy their titles and tags. Then you need to get the video’s views up. You can do this by watching it over and over and having friends, staff and family do it as well or you could download a Firefox plugin called Reload Every. Reload Every allows you to set your browser to reload at set intervals automatically so you can go to bed whilst the video plays over and over again, by morning its had hundreds of views. Youtube limit the number of views they allow from a single IP addresses but you can get it to well over 100 this way and then there’s the friends and family who may help give your video some credibility to get it started. This is to get the ball rolling, since people won’t watch a video that has not been viewed.
The next thing you want to do is guide the Youtube algorithms to recognize your video against certain search phrases. You want to again get your friends, family and staff to search Youtube using your phrases and selecting your video in the list (even if its ten pages deep) and choosing it as the video they want to watch for those search phrases.
Our testing has also shown us that if the viewer goes to another one of our videos right after watching through it, Youtube will associate this footprint as relevant to the first and will start showing the second video in the “Other videos” section beside your first video when others play it. This strategy gives your content better exposure allowing it to gain some momentum for a viral roll out.
Another tactic in marketing videos involves participating. Joining industry related groups, friending people in these groups, commenting on their videos and leaving video messages on their content. Video sharing sites are like any other social network. Participate and add value to what others are doing to get noticed by them. If you target influential people in these sites, their audience will notice you as well.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! YouTube’s the second most searched engine after Google. Because of the barriers to building a video centric community you often find they’re the best quality. Tubinator helps build your YouTube community faster!
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Viral Videos |
In short, viral campaigns use existing networks and do not require much in terms of resources and have the potential for spreading like wild fire.
You can’t really know whether a video will become viral or not, until it is launched. However, there are things that you can do to make its chances of becoming viral greater. If your videos do become viral, by any stroke of luck or marketing tactic, it is one of the best forms of gorilla marketing to date. The reason is that videos play a very significant role in projecting marketing message - whether it is about your event launch or any other product. You need to end the videos with a call to action, in order to ensure that the viewer takes the next step towards your sales funnel- instead of just ending the conversation there.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! A novel way to rise above the noise is to send prospects or associates a video mail as an alternative to email.
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Leverage New Word Phrases |
The above tactics are applicable to events as a lot of events gain big offline media exposure throughout the time the event’s hype curve peaks, implanting a whole raft of word combinations into the community that are specific to the event. If you plan ahead you can have pages sitting in all top 10 search engine results for phrases that nobody is searching for today but will in three months from now. The cost of getting this position when there is no competition is much better than fighting for it when everyone wants to rank in it. There is a lot of money in working one step ahead of the cutting edge.
You can strategically plan your event launch cycle into a set of events distributed throughout the year. During the planning stages, it would be wise to do an in-depth research on what mainstream media would most likely be focusing throughout the year ahead. In this way you will be able to anticipate terms that are likely to be part of conversations in the future that aren’t spoken yet. Naming events and branding them off these phrases will help build a web presence with pages optimized to rank for these words…
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The Inside Scoop - Examples Of Gorilla Marketing |
I usually have significant fresh content running on my blogs that I like to share with members of my networks. As an example, I have a Facebook group for this book called “Social Traffic” with a growing number of fans and lots of traction. I pull content from my blogs onto this group on the “notes” page and tag prominent people (who have an authority on that topic) in my network so that the note shows up in their profile newsfeed. This puts me in front of the other people who see the update on their newsfeed. It also puts the people I tag in a position where they cannot resist clicking through to look. Basically, I attract an element of their audience to also become mine (if they are interested in the topics that I add in the notes). We collaborate on adding value to each other’s efforts, and in doing so introduce our followers to each other to follow. Through links to my blogs, I can effectively channelize this traffic into my sales funnel at almost no cost. That’s both collaborative Gorilla marketing and social marketing.
Just so you know; we have set this group up for all of you (readers of this book) to join and participate with us. We want you to become a part of the social traffic community, to share, collaborate and network with like-minded event marketers who understand social media and its role in their businesses. I personally encourage every one of you to come and join us, reading this book is just the beginning of our journey together.
People who are familiar with networking strategies often tag me back, in which case I leave comments on their blogs. The tag acts like a white flag, forming an unofficial syndicate of thought leaders who merge followings to establish instant social proof around their posts.
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Gorilla Marketing Tactics |
Gorilla marketing (or Guerrilla Marketing) is a way of promoting on very low budgets, by relying mostly on your time, energy, ideas, imagination and strategies - rather than traditional huge marketing budgets. I personally prefer to describe it in a simpler way; Using Social Media is, in fact, Gorilla Marketing.
When we see small shops (startups) with no marketing budgets make campaigns that affect millions of people, spread virally within minutes and rank top spots on search engines; we see gorilla marketing tactics taking place. I’m sure all of you must have seen the new high-budget Microsoft ads with Bill Gates and Seinfeld. Food for thought: did they actually increase their brand value in your eyes in any way? Probably not. Now think about the simple hug campaign video that was launched and spread like fire in the online world. Which of those videos will have a lasting impact on you as a viewer? Which of the videos are you more likely to remember and pass on to your friends? This evidently proves one very important fact: marketing budget is not directly related to the success of a campaign; creativity is…
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Events - Where Communities Meet |
First of all, we need to understand that every little instance or occasion in our lives is an event. A teleconference meeting with your staff is an event. A new purchase is an event. Hearing sad news about someone you care about is an event. Going out to watch a movie is an event. All of these different events make up our life experiences.
Everyone celebrates events; all people of all markets, locations, cultures celebrate events of some kind or the other. Events are a part of life. Everything big or small is an event and when we die those who attend our wake to remember us do so by reflecting on, in the most parts the events in our lives.
You’ll notice how when we try to think back to our earliest memories, we just remember glimpses of different situations or feelings. These glimpses were once events (whether recurring or one-time) that stayed on with us as memories. This observation has two important sub-thoughts that we can learn from:
1- If we react to different situations in our real-life just as meticulously as we plan large-scale events, imagine how it will affect the happiness quotient in our lives.
2- We don’t have to be marketing big events all the time; we just need to figure out how to create traction around small level things as well.
An event is an entire experience for all of the stakeholders involved in it – the audience, the attendees, the clients and the guests. The experience should be seamless right from the beginning, even before the event actually takes place. If ordering an iphone is an event in your life, then the experience begins from the moment you go to their website to place an order. Then it goes all the way from how the package looks like when it arrives to the promptness of their customer support staff. Similarly, for organized events, the experience begins from the moment people find out about it, all the way till after the launch. The smoother the flow, the more memorable the experience will be for everyone involved.
I recently got an invitation to a wedding with the most beautiful invite card that I’ve seen. Everything from the font, the graphics, to the feel of the card texture was wonderful. It also had a small personally addressed hand-written “looking forward to” note attached to it. Just the invite made me feel honoured to be invited and excited about being a part of it. For me, the wedding’s first touch moment was perfect.
So the idea is to turn your events into experiences that everyone would want to remember and feel special about. It also comes down to simple things, like making it simple for people to get back to you with regrets or RSVPs. Make it easy for them to find locations and venues. Give offers, discounts and giveaways. Also remember, that your event doesn’t just end at launch – the post-launch phase is just as important.
Simon U Ford (SUF.EDBD)
Today’s tip! One stop shopping for all your event marketing in social media needs you can’t go past my Events Listed networking and marketing platform. It’s invite only, here’s a backdoor pass on me.
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