I read an article by Jason Del Ray at Inc.com which gives a great outline on how to advertise on Facebook. As a small business owner, you will find some good tips here.

These days, it seems everyone and his mother has a Facebook page. In the U.S., about 100 million unique visitors flock to the social network every month. Many business owners are among them, using Facebook profiles to promote their companies and create customer communities. For some entrepreneurs, social networks have also become a useful advertising platform. Ellie Sawits, CEO of Frutels, a New York City–based maker of chocolate candies used to treat acne, says ads on Facebook are an affordable alternative to the high pay-per-click rates for acne-related keywords on Google’s AdWords. “For me, the economics of Google just don’t work,” she says. But it’s not easy to make your ad stand out among the Facebook status updates, party photos, and comments. Here are four tips to help you get started.

1. Choose your target

People who use social networks often divulge a plethora of personal information in their profiles, which can prove useful to advertisers. Facebook lets you pick and choose which groups you would like your ads to reach. Companies can target ads based on a user’s profile information, such as age, gender, location, college, relationship status, and interests. You can choose to target people who are fans of your company’s Facebook page or friends of your fans. Or avoid your fans altogether, if your goal is to broaden your pool of customers.

You can also advertise only to Facebook users who mention certain words in their profiles or status messages. For example, Howie Goldklang, co-owner of The Establishment, a hair salon and spa in Milwaukee, occasionally targets young women in Milwaukee whose pages mention the names of pop stars such as Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga. Zeroing in on a specific audience lets you get the most bang for your advertising buck, but be careful about narrowing your focus too much. When Chris Lindland, founder of Cordarounds.com, a clothing site based in San Francisco, attempted to target specific colleges in an ad campaign, he didn’t get many clicks. “I thought there was a chance to cordon off influencers in some way,” he says. “But I had to realize, everyone wears pants.”

2. Test, test — and test some more

Ad prices on Facebook are determined by auction, as they are on Google AdWords. You can pay based on either the number of times people see the ad or the number of times people actually click on it. The majority of Facebook advertisers choose the latter, says Tim Kendall, Facebook’s director of monetization. Still, it’s worth testing both payment types to see which is more cost effective, says David Berkowitz, senior director of emerging media and innovation for 360i, a digital marketing agency. He suggests spending about $20 or so for a small ad buy using both methods. “It’s incredibly cheap to run tests,” says Berkowitz.

Testing various target demographics is also a good idea, says Adam Golomb, the head of e-commerce at Eat’n Park Hospitality Group, a Pittsburgh-based company that runs a chain of 76 restaurants. Golomb launched an ad campaign last spring, hoping to draw more visitors to Eat’n Park’s Facebook page, where the company posts surveys, contests, and coupons. In testing, Golomb found that an ad targeting women performed better than one that targeted both sexes. “The click-through rate dropped dramatically when we went out to both,” he says. After he began advertising only to women, the company was able to add nearly 1,000 new fans over a two-week period.

3. Do your own tracking

Facebook keeps tabs on how many times your ads are shown and the number of clicks they receive. But it doesn’t track what users do after they click — did they make purchases or just browse and move on? That’s the largest drawback of Facebook’s ad service, says Lindland of Cordarounds.com. “Return on investment is not immediately trackable,” he says. Facebook’s Kendall says the company is working to include more information in its reporting tools. Until that happens, it’s critical to do your own tracking. “The beauty of microtargeting an ad buy based on location, age, and sex is the data you’re going to get out of that,” says Michael Kahn, senior vice president of marketing at the digital marketing firm Performics. “To not take advantage of that would be a terrible waste of an opportunity.” Sawits of Frutels uses two analytics programs: Google Analytics, which is free, and HitsLink, which starts at about $10 a month, to track which Facebook ads result in purchases. Sawits, who spent $50,000 on Facebook ads in 2009, says her rate of return is about 2 to 1.

4. Make your ads pop

Companies write their own ads, which may include a short headline, ad copy of 135 characters or fewer, and a small image. Ads must be crafted carefully, because it’s tough to get noticed. Typically, three ads from different advertisers run next to one another. And, of course, there are photos and messages from friends that compete for Facebook users’ attention. “It is a social network, so if you put up a traditional ad, you’re going to be pushed to the side,” says Goldklang. Edgy advertisements, he says, seem to work best for his hair salon, which caters to a young clientele. One advertisement that performed well last year proclaimed, “Springtime is here. Time to get waxed.” “I find just being irreverent and trying not to write in traditional copyspeak connects us the best with potential clients,” Goldklang says. Since he started advertising on Facebook a year and a half ago, the number of new clients who discovered the salon online has risen 20 percent.

Facebook will reject your advertisement if you use an image that is deemed too risqué or language that is deemed offensive or lewd. But it usually pays to push the envelope. Sawits says one of Frutels’s Facebook ads that includes a photograph of a woman licking a lollipop gets the most clicks.

For Facebook’s list of common advertiser mistakes, go to facebook.com/ads/mistakes.php.

Consider this: It wasn’t until 1997 that the Internet reached 50 million users in the United States. Facebook gained over 100 million users in the U.S. from January 2009 to January 2010, marking a 145 percent growth rate within one year, according to research by digital marketing agency iStrategy Labs. If you’re a business owner that hasn’t embraced social media networking as a major component of your success strategy, it’s due time to hop onboard.

“When you’ve got 300 million people on Facebook, that’s a huge business watering hole,” says Lon Safko, social media expert and co-author of The Social Media Bible: Tactics, Tools, and Strategies for Business Success, of the site’s global reach. “The profile is like an index to your company.”

While Facebook has become the most popular social media site, there are plenty of others for your company to explore. LinkedIn, for example, houses 55 million professionals seeking jobs, employees, or basic business or networking opportunities. MySpace, I believe has been left for those who paved the way such as Facebook, etc. but I doubt very much that it will make a return. It seems only good for bands at the moment.

The user profile is generally what distinguishes social networking sites from other social media platforms. It helps set the stage for building relationships with people who share the same interests, activities, or personal contacts, as opposed to primarily disseminating or digesting information feeds. This also means social networks enable companies to invite audiences to get to know its brand in a way that traditional forms of marketing or advertising can’t.

But what, exactly, are the methods that businesses should use to effectively leverage the burgeoning userbase of these sites as a tool to grow their companies? This post will detail what to do – and what not to do – in order to maintain a viable presence in the realm of social networking.

Developing a Social Networking Strategy

Before opening an account and becoming active, it’s important to consider what each site offers and how you can benefit from their resources. Figure out which tools are best for your demographic. Without a fully developed plan for your social networking activity, you could end up meandering throughout the sites and wasting a lot of time.

Here are a few basic questions to ask yourself when forming your social networking strategy:
1.    What are the needs of my business? Hopefully, you’re not putting your company name on a social networking account just to send messages back and forth to former high school classmates, so there has to be an impetus. Figure out what your needs are. Are you short-staffed? Is your advertising budget running thin?

2.    What am I using the site for? After you’ve established your needs, consider the primary goal of your social networking strategy. Do you want to recruit employees for a certain department? Do you want to market a new line of products? Do you want to connect to more people in your industry?

3.    Whose attention am I trying to get? Okay, so you want to market that new line of products, for example. You still need to know your target audience for that product, and with more than 300 million users on Facebook, you’ll need to narrow your focus.

Got those answered? Good. Now, consider these questions:
1.    Which sites do I want to take on? If you have enough staffing power to handle multiple social networking sites, that’s great. If not, it’s important to focus on one or two, or you could spread yourself too thin and fall victim to the “gaping void” perception, where you end up going days without activity. Your followers will notice.

2.    Who’s going to manage my page? Would your social networking activity fall under a current employee’s responsibilities, or do you need to bring on new talent? If you ever find yourself without the staffing resources to manage your page, don’t stick your head in the sand, says Safko. “Find some interns,” he advises. “In most cases, they’ll do it for free.”

3.    Who has access to my page? What type of trust level do you have established at your company? Will all of your employees have access to the social network account, or a select few? Take the time to assess the skills and character of those who can log into your page, or you may run into unsavory situations down the road – especially when dealing with former workers.

4.    Who’s going to be the personality of my page? Does your company already have a public representative that usually handles speeches, press, etc.? It may be beneficial to rein in that person as the voice of your social networking site. Just remember that people buy from other people, not from other companies. Try to pick someone, even yourself, to represent your brand. Many people do it successfully, such as Richard Branson, Mark Bouris, etc. But be careful, because some do it bad.

In the end, just enjoy the relationship between you and the customer because that’s how you will pick up their loyalty, by delivering quality and reliability.

Have you had experience with successfully generating business from social networking? Let me know below.

Paul

Businesses large and small are guilty of wasting precious marketing dollars. In almost every ‘wasted dollars’ scenario there is a recurring theme  – the lack of a robust and considered marketing strategy that guides everything from consistency of message to targeting, tonality, presentation and expectations.

Below are outcomes of a defined marketing strategy for your business – and if embraced will save you from wasting precious marketing dollars.

Have you ever placed an advertisement or run a promotion and received little or no response in spite of having a terrific product or service offer? Well you’re not alone. ! Nine times out of ten the reason is quite simple – poor targeting or the scattergun approach. Imagine a farmer sowing seeds widely across his whole field, taking no account of whether the soil is fertile, or having furrowed the field, or which way the wind is blowing. It will come as no surprise if only some of the seeds take root and flourish.

The same applies to promoting your business and its products – you simply can’t afford to waste valuable marketing dollars- in this manner. If you haven’t decided exactly who you want to reach with your message and how best to reach them you are unlikely to succeed and very likely to waste your investment in marketing. The marketer who tries to be everything to everyone ends up being nothing to everyone.

One of the keys to marketing success is knowing your customers and to target them well. Imagine them sitting in front of you. What do they look like? What do they talk about? What are they saying? What are their opinions? What influences them? Whose opinion do they value? And so on. By considering their mindset you have a better knowledge of what really motivates their decision making when it comes to buying your products or services. This is called Motivational Segmentation. This segmentation process assists with targeting because the better you understand what motivates your target audience, the more likely you are to strike a chord with them.

Every successful business and marketer has a deep and insightful understanding of the market they operate in and carefully segment that market. Here is an example of how motivational segmentation could drive a business. Nearly every shopping centre in Australia has an optometrist. But how do they differentiate themselves – other than the name of the company, chain or proprietor?  Rather than, for example, talking to everyone who wears prescription glasses, you might segment down to people who are more motivated by how they look rather than how they see. Further motivational segmentation might allow you to target fashion conscious women in a certain age group (rather than men and women or all women).

Now that you have a specific target audience in mind, you can really start to get into their mind – with motivational segmentation – and ‘bring this customer to life’. You can imagine what kind of brands they admire and align with. What your store should look like as a result. What kind of sales people you need (and how they dress and present themselves).  You could also now work with other marketers outside your category to present ‘bundled offers’ such as a makeover from the beauty shop when you buy a pair of X brand frames, for example.

Now imagine what your marketing dollars can do and how you’ll be able to decide where and when to invest them. Spring fashion season creates a whole new selling opportunity in this scenario when you have this kind of segmentation analysis sitting inside your Marketing Strategy plans.

Segmentation allows your company to ‘tailor your offer’ in order to become differentiated, more meaningful and relevant to a discreet section (or sections) of the total market. Having defined very clearly the benefits of targeting segments that you understand and want to communicate with, you’ll be investing marketing dollars and not wasting them.

Now let’s explore another area that is also very wasteful in terms of marketing dollars. Not surprisingly, many companies who operate without a marketing strategy use their marketing communications (that can mean anything from answering the phone to brochure presentation, from web site to direct mail, from advertising to sales presentations) as some kind of very expensive market research testing process. As a consequence there is no consistency of message. There is no consistency of tonality or look and a lack of consistency in ‘customer benefits’ communicated. All in all there is a lack of consistency for your overall brand. Customers are more likely to buy from you when they have a feeling of comfort from the messages and signals you send them.

Brands are like people. A brand needs to be liked and welcomed. It needs to be understood. It needs to be trusted. And the key to understanding and trust is consistency. In marketing this consistency is conveyed in what you say, how you say it, where you say it and in presentation (typography, brand colour palettes, tonality).

Consistency and repetition are the hallmarks of brands and companies. Those who build trust from their customers will have them coming back time and time again. This is because they consistently deliver, and as an outcome, their customers trust them. They are not one thing one day and another thing another day. Repetition builds reputation.

Do you know of any quality marketing companies that have helped you in your small business? I would love to get your feedback.

PD

I mentioned to some friends and collegues that I have recently joined Twitter and the general response is “I’ve heard about it, what is it?” Or, “That is the dumbest thing I have heard of. Who cares what anyone is doing throughout the day?” To some point, I agree with the second point, but by looking at it with a one sided view, as a business you can miss so many opportunities.

For those of you who don’t know what Twitter is, here’s the simple version: You can type in what you are doing throughout the day by writing on your page. You have 60 characters to let everyone know what you are doing. You follow people and you receive their updates aswell. If you are a Facebook user and have seen the ‘what are you doing now’ section, that’s basically all that Twitter is.

To look at Twitter as just a graffiti wall for your daily movements is naive and could cost you traffic to your site and missed opportunities as a small business. If you are in business, it’s a tool. Like anything, you need to learn how to use it wisely. I follow many different people for a variety of reasons. I follow leaders in different areas that I find interesting, such as John C Maxwell, who writes books on leadership and business. I follow those in marketing like Seth Godin, who is known as the foremost authority on everything marketing. And I also follow my staff to see what their interests are.

One major way to use Twitter is to use links. You may have a press release, a new product, a new staff member, etc who you want to tell the world about. Twitter only allows you to use 60 characters, but when you put a link to a page on your site where the press release or news story is held, your followers can click on the link and read the page. If you have hundreds or thousands of followers, your press release is instantly read by those people straight away!

If your link is quite long like http://www.protectmywealth.com.au/bla/bla/bla/bla then you will need to shorten it to fit in the Twitter update. You can use Tiny Urls which shorten your URL to fit in the required space. If there’s a need for something, the internet will provide!

So, if you have a press release, or need to tell the world about some awesome thing you have seen or heard with breaking news, get onto Twitter and get it happening. It’s free to use, so it cant hurt to try. It won’t work for everyone, but as more and more people (especially Gen X & Y) are living through the internet, these sort of social media sites will become more important to your business or products.

PD