M & A Rainmaker

If you are interested in Social Media and live in Lichfield, Home of the Cathedral the Saxon Hoard  the intersection of Watling Street and Icknield Street and all sorts of other interesting things then this post may be of interest to you.

In an ideal world it is going to sit near the top of a Google search on this topic and make a point ……..

If you want to be found for the products and services that you offer then you had better understand that Social Media alone will not achieve your objective. It does not matter whether you live in Lichfield, Staffs or anywhere else.

Largely speaking social media networks are closed communities ( they might be huge closed communities !! ) in relation to Google and other searches  and they are subject to their own particular connectivity quirks. Stuff you post on e.g. Facebook stays ( largely) on Facebook.

That is you will NOT create effective networks ( effective being ones that enable you to sell more of your products and services ) on Social Media networks alone – no matter how large your social media networks  are.

Examine your own behavior when it comes to searching for information, products and services. I will bet money that you still rely considerably on word of mouth ( WoM )  recommendations and then use search engines like Google. You might, having shifted communications with your friends from mobile/text to e.g. Twitter or Facebook, ask them what they think about something via Twitter or Facebook but you are still looking for what is essentially a WoM recommendation – just at light speed.

In reality we are, whether we like it or not, a generation of Googlers. If you want information on something; want to find something or want to buy something you Google it. You rarely used any of the advanced search options ( Those are for people in the know ). If you are like my 20 something children then you Google the exact question e.g. ” How do you fit a rear quarter light to a Peugeot ?? ” ( Try it !! ) and back comes the answer ( s ) – typically in the case of car repairs etc from forums of various kinds.

You want to ” buy an oil painting in Lichfield ” ?? Google it and you will find

http://www.framework-gallery.co.uk/ a couple of results down.

Do a Facebook search ?? ( Bing gives you Framework Gallery aswell ). Try Twitter, YouTube ?? Nothing much.

( Well done Framework Gallery by the way ! )

Being found ( via search engines ) is the key. Social Media does have a role in this. How do you get found ??

Well first, critically but not necessarily obviously you have to work out what you want to be found for ???

In Search Engine Optimisation ( S.E.O. ) speak this means what are the key words ( keywords ) and phrases that you want to be found for ?

Unsurprisingly if you want to be found for ” Social Media in Lichfield Staffordshire ” then those words and phrases need to be appearing in your website and ” content ” –  basically in everything you post online.

There are basically 3 important things in a website being found:

1. That the pages reflect the things that you want to be found for.

2. That you keep posting new, fresh relevant content ( e.g. using a blog like this one ).

3. That by doing so people will create links to your website and blogsite.  ( You become an authority in this area ).

Once the website has been found then it needs to convert ” interest ” to ” action ” e.g. sign up for a free trial offer; join a mailing list; ring a number etc ( In the trade this is known as a Call to Action ).

You also need to able to analyse what’s working – so you need the capability to do so. ( Some ” analytics ” software ).

Social Media enables you to create contacts and awareness of what you do. It is VERY time consuming but it will help to encourage visitors to your website and begin the process of them becoming customers. In some cases this can happen very quickly, in others it can take some time.

For more on this subject search on ” Marketing Newsletters ” on this blogsite.

Yes, well it may APPEAR as though nothing has happened but actually – in the background it has.

I have been talking to Howard at Seventh Wave Media ( http://www.seventhwavemedia.co.uk/home ) and Nikki at Nikki Pilkington.com ( http://www.nikkipilkington.com/ ) about what we are doing and I have one more ” adviser ” that I want to involve in the experiment.

Obviously the companies that we are working with have loads of other things to do other than this.

The main tasks that we have set have been for them to produce initial lists of what they want to be found on the Internet for. We have also given them an appreciation of the fact that when we try and get them found for these things ( and any others that we come up with after discussion ) some of them will be harder to do than others. So we are looking for some flexibility and lateral thinking. We also asked then to think about thier main products and services and then prioritise the keywords/phrases in line with what is most important to them.

Nikki made a great point which was that we not only need to look at what they want to be found for but also what it is worth putting the effort into being found for  ( effort/reward ratio ?? ). This made me think about a Cisco chart I once saw where they plotted all the things that they wanted to do from an Internet presence perspective on a graph of ” How difficult to do and how costly ” to ” What benefit would be derived from it ” and then picked off all the easy to do and derived great benefit points first and then left the harder more expensive and lower return ones until last.

This went well with the fact that we gave advice on the fact that some things are much harder to rank for than others and we have various ways of finding out how easy it will be to rank for different things.  If we can find relevant, less competitive keywords it will be much easier to be found and rank for these than it will be  for competitive ones.

Anyway we have initial lists back from both companies now and we are looking at these. I did have a bit of a test yesterday using Ecademy posts to see if I could get a ranking for a couple of the terms and I did get a number one listing for one of the terms within an hour and a middle of page one ranking for another within 12 hours. So, both of these terms look doable.

We have also asked the companies to get Google Webmaster Tools ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Webmaster_Tools ) and Google Analytics (  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Analytics )    installed on thier websites so that we can look at the effect that all of our effort has on traffic to thier website.

Remember, at the end of the day we are interested in how much business they get out of all this but first we will look to improve visibility, findability and then visitors to them and thier websites. We will be looking for all forms of inbound enquiries – emails, posts, phone calls etc etc

We also had a discussion about email-shots with one of the companies and I have put up a few comments about this both here on this blog and elsewhere. It was quite interesting looking at various email-shot companies and looking at what other people were doing with thier own email-shots. This led to an emphasis on the fact that email-shots are connected into the New Media Marketing Whirlpool in a number of ways eg the email-shot will refer people back to the website, offer links to eg Twitter,Facebook etc pages and needs a url with a relevant decsription so that the email can be posted on various Social Network and Information sites.