How Associations Can Harness The Power Of Social

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Associations, whether national, regional, or local, are essentially communities. They are comprised of groups of tribes or individuals who are united by shared goals, interests, or preferences. Associations are, by their very nature, social.

This presents a unique and especially prescient opportunity for associations to leverage the power of new social communication, marketing, and media techniques to achieve their goals like never before. Whether they are professional, charitable, trade, political, cultural, or otherwise, associations may need to fulfill multiple mandates: advocacy, awareness, fund raising, education, communicating, lobbying, among others.

Chances are your association’s key initiatives include:

• Communicating with members
• Demonstrating value to the membership
• Advocating on behalf of consumers at large

What Social Can Do

Utilizing social marketing can open a community of engaged advocates, both members and non-members, who are willing to share your message across their respective social networks, generate awareness, and solidify your associations mandate with the public at large. However your association will have to engage with those advocates and leverage the power of social channels effectively. Here’s how.

Three Key Factors In Harnessing Social Channels

1. Be In The Community

Your association needs to be an active participant on all of the obvious networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. This means you need to go where your members are, and they are everywhere.

2. You Need A Plan

Simply signing up for an account on any given social platform does not mean your association has fulfilled its obligation. Social connections via your chosen networks are not obligations but opportunities to engage directly with your members. This direct connection requires a clear plan with regard to infrastructure, integration, and most importantly a set rules of engagement policy. There is nothing more important than a planned and coordinated process for responding to negative comments.

3. Content

Well-crafted and professionally produced text, audio, and video that clearly communicate your organization’s message are core to a great content marketing strategy. Content is the essential asset that will drive readers to your association via online and mobile. Since many associations are in the enviable position of having a business model based on providing information to their members, the raw materials for stellar content is often at their fingertips. Niche by definition, associations that create well crafted, shareable, and SEO friendly content can effectively push their message online.

Harness The Power Of Social Channels

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How to Develop a B2B Content Strategy

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Today’s consumers are like proverbial husbands who refuse to pull over and ask for directions. Folks simply want the instant satisfaction of finding their own way to their destination. Your business is the destination. But can you be found?

This phenomenon has put huge marketing emphasis on the notion of discovery. It’s all the more important because consumers are also increasingly eschewing interruption marketing. No wonder 40% of marketing dollars have been shifted to inbound marketing techniques.

It’s critical that marketers embrace content initiatives and blend them with traditional methods. It’s not a question of whether to move in this direction. It’s a matter of survival.

Getting Started With Creative Content Marketing

1. Get Clear About Your Goals

What do you want to happen as a result of mobilizing a content initiative? Do you need to build awareness for your organization? Are you educating consumers? Or do you want to sell a product or service? If the latter, do you want to incorporate a lead generation component that will deliver prospects into your deal funnel? Setting crystal clear goals will best inform your content strategy.

2. Assess Internal Sources for Content

Most businesses don’t think like media companies unless there is a printing press in the basement or an antenna on the roof. Oftentimes, marketers are surprised to find great raw material sources within the organization. Take inventory. Do you produce or commission proprietary research or industry data? Who within your company has specific expertise, industry cache, or public speaking ability and can they serve as a thought leader for your efforts? These assets are often found right under your nose.

3. Identify External Content Sources

Feeding the content machine requires ready access to external raw material. Assess what is already available from industry associations, co-owned companies, partner organizations, even trade media or publications.

4. Get Help From Content Creation Experts

A medical professional would not all of a sudden feel the need to fix their own car. Likewise a licensed mechanic would never offer a triple bypass with an oil change. Executing a creative content strategy depends on your ability to create engaging, compelling, SEO-optimized… even entertaining content on a regular basis. It’s essential to call on experienced media people who are also marketers in order to deploy content that delivers on all of the above.

5. Develop a Plan and Execute

More than article marketing, web content, or public relations, your content marketing strategy will need to be a highly integrated series of blog posts, audio podcasts, video, white papers, and ebooks – the ultimate mix, of course, will depend on the particular goals of your organization.

Get Started With Content Marketing

A stellar content strategy will flow directly from your goals and will take into consideration all the obstacles that face your business as well as capitalize on specific opportunities in your sector. An optimized approach will facilitate discovery on the part of consumers and imbue your business with credibility as a thought leader in your field.

Businesses that employ inbound marketing and content creation initiatives find it much easier to attract pre-qualified prospects that are predisposed to buy. Finally, as any sales professional will tell you, once value has been established price becomes a secondary or even a non-issue.

Let’s Develop A Content Strategy

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Creating Direct Communication With Potential Investors

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The New Rules For Reaching Retail And Institutional Investors

The key factor behind the bottom-line of any investor relations professional is valuation. The art of effective communication to achieve the highest possible valuation for your company or client is the driving force behind successful, profitable investor relations campaigns.

The internet has fundamentally changed the way in which investor communication is disseminated to investors and potential investors. Early on, the IR section of your company website was a “nice to have” but not a necessary feature. However, in today’s market not only is it expected that your organization maintain an in-depth IR section on your website, governing regulatory bodies now provide guidelines on requirements for those web pages. Communication with investors via your website and the industry standard email subscription newsletter may feel like an effective means for getting out your message but are you effectively harnessing all available channels?

The exponential growth and relatively fast adoption of various social platforms on today’s internet provides IR professionals with an even deeper set of tools to tell their story. You only need to take a look at IR Web Report’s current social media section (click here >) to understand the importance these tools now play in the marketplace. Publicly traded companies are harnessing social channels to communicate with potential investors and shape their brand message. The key to utilizing these essential social channels is a cohesive brand message across all platforms with the understanding that this is a direct connection to your audience; a connection that well exceeds the usual email newsletter approach.

With this direct connection comes a new set of considerations:

1. Cohesion Across Platforms

Across all social platforms, your investors, both retail and institutional need to be viewed as one audience. Retail or institutional, both require the same information. Just as social cannot be the only means for disseminating timely investor information no longer can your website and newsletter be relied upon as the sole means of communication.

2. The Benefits Of Immediacy

Social content pushed through the appropriate channels now places higher than the most meticulously crafted SEO optimized content when searching on Google. Why? Many searches are now based on relevancy and how timely the indexed information is that is being searched for.

3. Shaping Your Message

Monitoring and tracking what is being said about your brand online provides your organization with the ability to engage in conversations that previously occurred beyond your reach. The effective shaping of your corporate message and the governance of a cohesive rules of engagement plan assists in mitigating the inherent risks.

Social media, on all platforms, is no longer a tool solely intended for consumer communication. B2B, HR and now some of the most innovative IR professionals are beginning to appreciate the value in social. We are seeing the emergence of fully socialized businesses in all sectors including those that are publicly traded.

Want to Harness Social For IR?

We can help evolve your social strategy, right now. We begin every client engagement with a Marketing Assessment. And that process begins with a simple conversation.

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7 Ways To Better Investor Relations

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With Improved Inbound Marketing

Here are some steps that with the help of a good marketing firm you can implement right away to dramatically improve the quantity and quality of inbound investment leads.

1. Generate More Web Traffic – Investor relations professionals constantly tell us that their single biggest challenge is getting more potential investors to visit their website. By developing an inbound marketing strategy, you will be able to attract qualified prospects to your company.

2. Create Custom Content – With the help of media marketing experts, you can publish your press stories, blog posts… even audio and video as compelling, searchable editorial content that can easily be deployed across multiple channels, exponentially increasing opportunities for investors to find you.

3. Utilize every social channel – Whether Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, or others, consumers increasingly rely on social mediums to connect and discover information. Furthermore, 81% of US consumers consider blogs to be a reliable source of advice and product information.

4. Optimize every communication – Using highly developed inbound marketing software, it is possible to determine the best possible keywords and phrases that will best appeal to your target and incorporate them into all the content, to aid in search and discovery.

5. Generate Leads – It is highly desirable to collect, monitor, and chart all your prospective investors activity on your site, to build a relationship, and pre-qualify them with a series of on-site initiatives.

6. Nurture Those Leads – Consumers will be drawn to your site to read/consume general industry information, learn about social and green initiatives, or to pre-qualify themselves on the investment potential of your business. You must harness these leads and nurture them to fruition.

7. Measure. Refine & Repeat – These essential cutting-edge must be tracked and measured. Based on the results every campaign must be tweaked for optimum performance.

Social Media Is A Valuable IR Tool

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Does SEO Matter Anymore?

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The push is on to put SEO to the bottom of the pile and for good reason. The web has become a sea of discoverability, no longer dictated by outdated SEO placement tactics and replaced with what can only be described as a true content push.

Your users or customers are less and less fooled by the SEO tactics of the past and are now drawn into content that has personal value. Strong content pushed to social circles by friends, followers and business peers is now drawing as much, if not more, audience than any well placed search term.

Large scale online properties, such as The Atlantic, are now pushing traffic through social channels much more effectively than through SEO based placement.

[info]“Sixteen months ago we received the same number of monthly referrals from search as social. Now 40% of traffic comes from social media,”
Scott Havens, Senior Vice President of finance and digital operations at The Atlantic Media Company.
[/info]

The creation and dissemination of content may be what binds your marketing message together, however, that content now needs to be offered with in the right context. Pushing that content within the right context requires deep, cohesive strategy that goes well beyond key words and a strong headline. Contextual content that your readers are compelled to share to their respective networks is the key to a successful strategy.

There is a deep shift occurring in how people find what they are looking for online. This shift is not solely based on algorithms and programming but also takes into account – location, browsing habits, relevancy and social connections. Users are now provided with web search, particularly Google, that is predictive in nature.

With the advent of Google Now users are beginning to see the shift in how they will search for online content. By combining predictive search technology with real time visualization we can see Google’s continual shift from a simply a search engine to a predictive, personal assistant that will understand what you are searching for within context. Google Now achieves this by accessing your email, calendar, contacts, text messages, location, shopping habits, payment history, music choices, books read and movies you have watched. For some this may seem to be a deep breach of privacy and those privacy parameters are yet to be fully established. For others, like myself, this appears to be the natural progression of technology to become the personal assistant we have only seen in science fiction until now.

The key motivator for this shift in contextual search results is, without a doubt, the deep market penetration of mobile devices. Predictive in its results, this type of search technology is pushing information to you based on what information the device already knows about your likes, habits and social connections.

So how will effective marketing campaigns have to reshape themselves within a world driven by predictive, location aware search results?

Effective marketing campaigns will now have to adopt an active listening approach to fully incorporate customers in the feedback loop. The consumer voice has never been so strong and those businesses that pay attention to active consumer voices will see the rewards. Your companies reputation online has never been as important as is it now. Products and services spoken of favorably online will, without a doubt, see themselves pushed to the top of predictive search results.

In addition to active listening, inbound marketing becomes an important factor in an effective marketing strategy. Focusing on being found by your customers by providing high value content that is relevant to their wants and draws them into contacting you is now the strongest tool in attracting potential clients. As your content takes shape and becomes distributed across networks your offering obtains authenticity. For many marketers this is a drastic shift from the traditional outbound model, however, brands that do not shift a portion of their marketing budget to an inbound marketing model will have more and more difficulty conveying their message.

So does this mean that SEO is still a relevant means to garner traffic for your online properties? Probably yes. However, predictive search technology does create some division in how content will be optimized depending on the platform you are focusing your efforts on. With mobile access now exceeding desktop access for many online services, a deeper focus will be weighed on relevance and reputation in regards to predictive search results.

It’s all about location, location, location.

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