A Brief Guide Using Facebook for Business
Facebook is the ubiquitous king of social networking, universally accepted into nearly all of our lives.  Scanning a user’s timeline reveals stories of relationships, birthdays, wins and losses and connects us in a way never thought possible prior to its invention. As such, Facebook is often used as a Social Media home base for many businesses because of the profound marketing insights the networks provides.
Facebook is used for a congregation, conversation, and publication with users engaging with brands that they feel a social connection to rather than those that simply sell toa them.  The Facebook newsfeed algorithm gives preferential treatment to brands that receive significant interaction with their posts, which makes it hard for new businesses to gain any impressions or interaction when their fan base is small. Â
In order to solve this issue, Facebook introduced several tools for business to utilize in order to increase their exposure on the platform:
Facebook for Business is an excellent resource to how to advertise on Facebook and grow your sales with Facebook Advertising. Â For example, A boosted post is a post from your business page that can reach a larger audience for a fee based on the amount of exposure needed to reach your target.
Facebook Page Insights provides comprehensive analytics of your business page. Â By analyzing this data you are able to hone your content based on your audience demographics, the content they engage with most, and the optimal times to share. Ignoring these analytics is most certainly to your detriment. For instance, we noticed that our clients that utilize video were receiving 80% higher engagement.
Facebook Studio is a tool that exhibits the most successful marketing campaigns on Facebook. Each year, the most successful campaigns get recognized by Facebook and this resource can be used for marketing inspiration for your campaigns. See what works and how you can adapt such ideas to your unique marketing goals.
That leads us to Facebook advertising tools:
Facebook Ads are advertising that can be targeted to users based on location, demographics, behavior, and interests. The purpose of these ads can be to grow your fan base, drive traffic to your website, increase a specific conversion (which can even be tracked with a piece of code) or download your app. Â Whatever your call to action might be, Facebook offers template-based campaigns that marketers will certainly find useful.
With that in mind, social is one aspect of a successful campaign that must be part of a larger marketing effort in order to generate any measurable results. Â HARNESS works with our clients to develop an overall marketing strategy based on their unique goals by identifying value propositions, designing a campaign catered to their audience, and drawing on a variety of tools including those mentioned above.
7 Tips To Follow Up With Convention and Trade Show Leads
So you and your team committed the time and financial resources to prepare and attend a convention or tradeshow. You met many interesting prospects that are a perfect fit for your product or service.  If you have done this before, then you know how important it is to remember every detail of that conversation to personalize your follow-up.  Unfortunately, this is something that many salespeople ignore or put off until the details have faded from memory. It is those details that allow a salesperson to personalize the subsequent exchanges following the show. Don’t you just hate those cold post-event emails with no personalized context? Read on for a few tips on how to follow up with leads.
BE ORGANIZED
Gathering business cards is better than nothing, but it may not be enough of a trigger to remind you of who a future customer is and why you want to follow up with them. Before the trade show, create a Twitter list for the event, and add all of your new contacts to the list by following their Twitter account. Search for hashtags related to the show and follow people you may not have met, but would like to. Also, take pictures of the people you meet at the show (with their permission, of course) when the opportunity allows. Later, you can add the photo to your CRM, and it will help you remember who they are and what you talked about. Â
FOLLOW-UP
Prepare your new contacts for future connection by telling them that you’ll follow up.  Give them a date and a time of when they can expect a call or an email from you. It could be something as simple as “When I get back to the office, I’ll make sure and get that information to you.” This will make you accountable!
SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media is a great low-pressure platform to nurture your new business relationships slowly. Say you met someone that you would like to stay connected to, but during the conversation you didn’t get a chance to set a time for follow up.  Social media is the most natural medium to keep up with that contact and continue the conversation. Going back to the Twitter list. Hopefully, you’ve already added your contacts. Send out a message saying, “It was so nice meeting you; I can’t wait to continue our conversation on XYZ!” Now they are expecting your follow-up. Â
Another good low-pressure platform is LinkedIn. Invite them to connect on LinkedIn, and making sure to send a personalized invitation that includes a reminder of how you met. Also, make sure to interact with their activity on LinkedIn, Twitter and elsewhere. Share their company’s content when possible, and tag them to make them aware (and appreciative).
Facebook, on the other hand, is a bit more personal. Â If you are not able to find a contact on LinkedIn or Twitter, send them an email and invite them to connect with you through your personal Facebook profile. Â If they have a Facebook business page (most companies do), follow them and engage with their content on there. Â Instagram is also a perfect place to nurture a relationship. Â Before the event, search for applicable hashtags targeting the show or the industries as well as the businesses that will be at the event. Â Follow their account, and make sure to also comment and like their content shared on the platform. Â
Send an email a day or two after the conference.  You don’t want to wait too long.  During these events, you meet a lot of people in a short period.  So you want to make sure that your name and company are not forgotten after the show. Remind your contact how you met and mention a key highlight or two from your conversation. If you can think of anything that might help them (a tool, app, blog post, ebook, or even an article on a 3rd party periodical), make sure to pass that along.  You can even ask them about that trip they mentioned or about that school event their child was attending. The more personal you get, the closer the relationship feels. People appreciate it when you show them that you care by remembering details of your conversation. Â
CALL
If a contact gave you their phone number, and you mentioned that you would be following up with a call then do it.  They are expecting you to.  If you catch them at a busy time, make sure to schedule another call before you hang up.  Also, don’t follow up first thing on Monday, give you contact some room to breathe after the show. Â
IN-PERSON
If you’re in the same geographic area, and your contact is aware that you will be stopping by, visit them and drop off additional information and maybe an invitation for coffee or lunch for another day. Respect their busy schedules, but show some initiative and take advantage of your proximity if you want to connect. They will not forget that you stopped by the office.
FOLLOW-UP SOME MORE
If you tried all the above and you were not able to get a hold of someone, don’t give up that easily.  There are two possibilities:  They are uninterested in continuing the conversation at this time because of a lack of a current need for your product or service, or they are busy and could not find a chance to talk.  Make sure to create a monthly, rhythmic follow up with these contacts and remind them of you and your business.  Eventually, your business will be on their mind whenever they need your services or product.  At this point, your name and your contact info will be easy to reach, and they will turn into a customer when the time is right.
What is Marketing Automation?
What is Marketing Automation? The Top 3 Reasons You Should Be Using This Technology
Here is a scenario you may be up against if you are doing things right:
You have been working hard over the recent past to create content such as videos, blog posts, infographics, and white papers that are interesting and valuable to your future customers. You have a fan base on social media that is engaged with your posts and sharing them. You have created regular traffic to your blog posts and your email list is growing.
Further, some of these users may even be demonstrating buying cues such as looking at your pricing page and checking out your testimonials - but how would you know when that occurs and follow up at the right time? More importantly, the question remains - how do you nurture these leads into buying customers?
The answer:
Marketing Automation: a means to drive more leads, convert leads into sales, and measure ROI of individual campaigns.
1. Generate More Leads
With marketing automation software, we are able to identify anonymous visitors to our site. That means we can prospect more accurately because we know which companies are interested. We can also capture information in forms from users that are interested in staying up to date with our video content, requesting a demo, or in exchange for an infographic or white paper.
2. Drive Sales
Once that user is in our system, his use can be tracked at each subsequent visit to our website - we know when our prospects visit. Based on his visits and actions on our site, the user will be segmented into a campaign with personalized follow-up information to nurture the relationship. For example, if he shows interest in our Video Marketing for eCommerce videos, we can automatically send him information that pertains to our eCommerce content creation services.
Even more interesting is the way the system scores leads based on a number of parameters that we can set based on a client's unique business. Â An example of a high profile lead in the system would be a user that visits frequently, fills out a form, clicks-through on our emails, and downloads a white paper. Once a lead meets certain parameters and is moving through the sales funnel, the follow-up approach changes to be sure to make the most of the opportunity. There is even an option for the system to alert a salesperson to make a direct call when a prospect is on the site.
3. Measure ROI
The automation software provides comprehensive analytics for each individual campaign so marketers can measure what is working best and where to allocate marketing resources. There are extensive reporting features with exportable graphs to share with your teams, allowing for firms to make better, data-driven decisions, which in turn reduces costs.
Top 5 Marketing Trends for 2016
The Top 5 Marketing Trends for 2016
As you close out your books, finalize your goals, and add finishing touches to your marketing strategy for 2016 and beyond, HARNESS presents the marketing trends you should be considering as we move into the new year.
- Video & Video advertising -Â We have been talking about video's potential for years as we develop strategies with our clients, and it appears that many marketers have started to come around to the idea of its overwhelming importance. A media-rich customer experience is now critical for differentiating and delivering a message in the digital world. More importantly, advertising venues such as Google and Facebook are giving more weight and priority to video advertising yielding 80% higher engagement than other ad media. Finally, Google now includes video in its search algorithm meaning that in order to stay relevant in results you must be using video.
- Moving to Mobile -Â We have already seen this trend in our clients' analytics for the past two years. At the lowest level, we have witnessed 60% of website traffic coming from mobile users with upwards of 80% for some clients. That is going to continue as Google is including mobile-friendliness as a metric in its search algorithm which dictates where you place in search results.
- Bigger Budgets for Digital Ads -Â Advertising spending has been increasing for the past few years, and it is projected that companies will spend $10 Billion more in 2016 than in 2015. Based on simple economics, increased demand dictates that advertising online will become more expensive so marketers will need to work even harder to optimize their keyword strategies. How much budget have you allocated for your digital ads?
- Digital Assistants - "Siri, find me a coffee shop nearby." As digital assistants become more and more reliable, business owners and marketers are realizing the importance of not only optimizing their websites for SEO, but also making their business details searchable by Siri and Cortana.
- Virtual Reality VR Video -Â This is no longer the realm of futurist novels and science fiction. VR video is very real and ready to be implemented for marketing purposes. Think about using virtual reality in your next video marketing project - how can you use it to better demonstrate your value propositions? HARNESS is very excited to offer VR 360 degree video as part of our video marketing services to our clients! To give you an idea of what is possible, check out this climbing video shot in VR 360:
Here is the major take-home point for 2016 marketing trends: if you are not prioritizing digital marketing, you will be left behind by your competitors. So what is the next for you in 2015? Are you going to improve your mobile experience or create an app? Have you increased your digital ad spend? Let us know in the comments.
Facebook Reactions Launch Worldwide
Facebook Reactions Launch Worldwide
Have you started noticing an abundance of emoticons today in your newsfeed? That is because Facebook has launched its "Reactions" worldwide. Adding to its Like button, Facebook now allows you to express more emotion in your quick reactions to content via Android, iOS, desktop, and mobile Web browser.
This feature has been tested since October when Zuckerberg revealed that he wanted to allow users to express more. By holding the like button, users can now add emoticons such as laughing, sad, or angry.
What does the launch of Reactions mean to marketers?
Users now have the conversation opened more broadly even with quick responses. What this implies is that we can infer more from a reaction than with a simple like. Prior to this launch, we were left with empty middle ground between a 'like' and a comment. Â Many users may not take the time to comment, but a 'like' did not fully capture their sentiments toward a piece of content.
With a Reaction, we can infer that a user may want to see more of a type of post. We can, therefore, create more dynamic conversations even on content that may not warrant the energy to comment.
Product Manager Sammi Krug said, "We see this as an opportunity for businesses and publishers to better understand how people are responding to their content on Facebook. Page owners will be able to see Reactions of all kinds on their post page insights."
Time will tell if this is a passing phase or something we users actually adopt, but for now, we have cool smileys and such. Yay!