Beyond the Buzz Marketing

Recently, I’ve had a spate of clients who have come to me after having not so pleasant experiences with other marketing companies or agencies.  The vast majority of these people have paid a fortune for products or services that didn’t benefit their company at all but they were part of a package that was sold to them by very prominent marketing companies. By the time these clients have gotten to me, they’re broke, their marketing needs a complete overhaul, and they’re gun shy.  

How can you avoid letting this happen to you?

Make sure you get what you pay for. One of my current clients was paying almost $2000 a month to a marketing company for Facebook and Twitter posts once a day that ended up being automated based on their own company blog. Do you get the significance of that? Someone in my client’s company was spending a good portion of their own time writing thought provoking business related blog posts and this marketing company just tweeted the title of the blog entry with a link back to my client’s blog. Oh and did I mention that every single tweet had the marketing company’s name in it somewhere? Seriously. That’s $2000 a month that my client was paying to have their own content tweeted by a company once a day while the marketing company was getting a shout out with each tweet. Social media marketing does not have to be an expensive venture.

1. Check the numbers. Find out how many hours they plan to work on your social media marketing each month. Then ask how many posts/tweets that translates into and how much interaction they’ll provide with your fans/followers. Then do the math. You may find out you’re paying someone $100 an hour to make one tweet or post for you every day.  Is that worth the value to you?
2. Ask for examples. You want to see current clients and what they’re doing for those clients. Then watch the Twitter/Facebook posts and see if they’re delivering.
3. Find out who will provide the content. If you’re still required to provide the information, facts, etc. then you shouldn’t be paying a significant amount to someone else to package it into 140 characters or less.
4. Watch closely.  Once you’ve hired someone to do your social media marketing, keep an eye on what they’re doing. It’s your company. Not theirs. Are they effectively sharing your message? Are they giving you everything they promised? And are your fans/followers responding to that message? If not, then you need to re-evaluate that relationship.
5. Ask questions. Any company worth paying can answer the questions you have about social media marketing.

The last thing to remember is a big one. There are a lot of self proclaimed social media ‘experts’ out there. Listen, there is no school giving degrees in social media. There’s no one certifying social media specialists and there’s no list of social media experts you can trust that’s out there. Social media is something that’s recently cropped up with the advent of Facebook, Twitter and before that, Myspace. When people realized the value in these venues, they began utilizing them. As they should. This created the social media phenomenon. But it does not create social media experts.  Spending time online does not make an expert. Just because someone spends a vast amount of time on Facebook or Twitter does not mean that they are a social media expert. They need to understand your message inside and out and be able to effectively communicate that relationship to your audience. At the same time, they need to build a relationship between your company and that audience in a professional manner. Make sure that whoever you hire to carry your company message knows more than just Twitter and Facebook. Effective social media requires effective marketing and communication. Period. There are no shortcuts when it comes to your company’s message.

Next time: Good Reputation or Name Dropping?

Lori Twichell is the owner of Beyond the Buzz Marketing. She is also the Marketing Director for Christian Work at Home Moms and JV Media Design. In her spare time, Lori is co-owner of Radiant Lit and a professional book reviewer for Fiction Addict. Lori and her husband live in San Antonio, Texas with their three kids and two dogs.

(This post by Lori Twichell originally featured at www.cwahm.com)

Many times when people think about someone who works from home, they don’t picture a professional working environment. Instead, they see us working from our bed or our living room in our jammies and having a much more relaxed schedule than what would happen in a regular office environment. (You can insert your laughter here.) This can give a perception that those of us who work from home are just doing this as a hobby or that we can’t be as professional as someone in a big power office somewhere. It can also serve to undermine their opinion of your ability to do the job. It’s up to us to change that perspective in their minds. Summer’s here. If your house is anything like mine, it’s much harder to do that, but it’s not impossible.

Have you ever had a house eruption? You know, when everything’s quiet and peaceful while you’re working (usually on the phone) and then chaos explodes in the background? Mine usually involve some sort of children screaming and dogs barking all at once. With summer here and all the kids home from school, this is an inevitability in my house. It happened one time when I was on the phone doing business with Dondi Scumaci. If you don’t know who Dondi is, she’s an international speaker and author specializing mentoring women in business. I began profusely and profoundly apologizing for the chaos, certain that I was offending my client. That was my mistake. Not the apology. You see, in that moment, I had shifted from professional Marketing Director to Mom. My client had become a guest in my home (even though she was on the phone) and I was treating her as such.

Dondi advised me to picture myself in a huge office with a big shiny marble desk and a wall of glass windows overlooking a city. This shifted my entire perspective. If my children were to burst into that shiny office with the marble desk, how would I explain it to a client on the phone? I would apologize, sure, but not from the perspective of a mom having a guest in her home. I’d apologize for the chaos in the background in the same way that I would if it were construction or some other noise in an office building that’s beyond my control. Instead of saying “I’m so sorry my kids are home from school and (insert excuses here)…” try “I’m sorry for the noise. My kids are in the office with me today.” You may be surprised at the reception you get.

This also works when you need to share your schedule or pull together a conference call or meeting. You may be carpooling from 2-3 pm every day or fixing lunch for your kids, but clients don’t need to know that. During those times, you have meetings. Or you’ll be out of the office. Don’t worry about sharing the details of why you’re out or you’re unavailable.

So next time you have a house eruption, picture that big shiny office with a view. Who knows? It might even help your stress level!

Lori Twichell is the owner of Beyond the Buzz Marketing . She is also the Marketing Director for Christian Work at Home Moms and JV Media Design. In her spare time, Lori is a managing partner with Radiant Lit and a professional book reviewer for Fiction Addict. Lori and her husband live in San Antonio, Texas with their three kids and two dogs.