Tenth Musings

3 Ways to use Pinterest for Special Event Marketing

2012-03-02T10:46:00.000-08:00

Pinterest is the rage in the social media and special events marketing world - and for good reason. It's a visually rich platform built on images, so it has lots of potential for any events that generate a lot of great images or video content. It has been said that a picture is worth a thousand words and all those pictures your event generates tell a story - that story is an integral part of your special events marketing strategy.

Special Events can use Pinterest for marketing in all three marketing phases:

1) Pre-event marketing - pin images and video from previous events or images that will draw the right audience. For example, if you have an art show, start a collection of great art imagery that all links back from Pinterest to your website and/or blog. Encourage participation by announcing to your mailing list that you have a board on Pinterest for lovers of art and start your audience participating in curating the collection. Run contests around art images and showcase outstanding images curated that week on your event Facebook page.

If you have previous images from last year's event, put those up - encourage event participants to share their pictures from last year. Done correctly, you end up creating a community built around the sharing of images relating to your event. We will come back to that word: community, in future posts. Social media is all about community.

2) During event - be posting pictures and video constantly from the event, encourage your participants to do the same. Create contests and build community. The more you interact with your social participants, the more they share your content and help you build your brand/event. If you can bring them back to an email sign up page and collect addresses for future marketing, even better.

3) Post event marketing - it's the day after your event and you've got hundreds of photos and videos sitting around not helping you start your marketing for next year. Pin 'em up! Put them out slowly over time so that you can use this month's collection of pictures as a reason to reach out and touch your email list or Facebook fans, encourage participants to share and repin. You did hire a professional photographer, didn't you? User pictures are wonderful, but you need your own professionally shot photos for promotion. This is such a small budget item in the grand scheme of things; and any event is pound foolish to be cutting this expense to save a few pennies.

Just like any other form of social media, there are dozens of ways to build community through participation and sharing. The only limit is your own creativity and willingness to spend the time to participate yourself and cultivate the relationship.

My boards in Pinterest are here. Follow me if you like gorgeous images of architecture and art!

Marketing Your Business: The Neighborhood Approach

2012-02-26T08:29:00.000-08:00

A Fresh Outlook to Alleviate the Confusion of SearchEngine Marketing & Search Engine Optimization

Introduction

We have several websites that we maintain for ourselves andclients, so we are barraged with emergency notices from vendors that thiswebsite or that one is in need of SEO. And fromtheir perspective, yes, they could use some; however, we think about more thanthe search result ranking when it comes to our sites. Result Ranking is highlyweighted as one of the more important desired outcomes, which is why SEM & SEO are thecurrent trends in strategic marketing. We prize their value as well, but we usethese techniques as tactical tools, not strategically.

Strategic & Tactical Marketing Considerations

When you design and implement your marketing plan, the firstthing you must decide is what you are selling. Most of us are selling goods,services, or both. This is critical to ascertain, especially with regards tothe idea of Search Engine Results Rankings and clicks on your website. Just amere “click” on a website can become a product if you can cause an enormous number of clicks to happen in ashort period of time, monetizing it through basing your Revenue Stream ontraditional Advertising Models, certain number of impressions (=clicks) equalsa particular cost to the advertiser. In this Advertising Model, as with a magazine’scirculation, what economically matters is the number-of-eyeballs on an ad. Hereyour objectives are to get any click on your page from anyone, stayfor a certain amount of time, and that is it. This subordinates your content tobait-on-a-hook status where you do not care what your content is or what it says,just as long as it relevant enough to get a click.

Relevant enough? For what? Enough for the search engines todetermine whether or not to put it at the top of the Organic Results for anyreason and for anyone. Huffington Post is agood example of this. They create little of their own source content, but theyare master curators of others’ content. To them, it does not matter that someonewith or without cancer clicks on an abstract of a currently circulatingarticle/subject on, say, some new research and product that helps. Theydelivered their value proposition to their customer segment when the page wasclicked-on or a sponsored ad was clicked-through. This is SEM & SEO onsteroids, and a business model in and of itself.

Wrap-up

The following posts will not be about the strategic seo gaming, although some of it is necessary andhelpful. We will explore the business owners’ opportunities to seize control oftheir own business marketing and have the marketing investment dollar returnten-fold in new access to the targeted customer segments.

In simple terms, if you are a Locksmith with a shop in LongBeach and take great pride in your 24-7 Emergency Services within a 25-mileradius. Unless you have invented a new bullet-proof locking mechanism that you wantto sell to anyone, your primary revenue streams lie within your 25-miles servicearea. You only deliver your value proposition when you make that service callor counter sale at the shop. So do not pay for advertising, marketing andpromotions dollar for anything outside your territory. If you are good andauthoritative, you will earn that fame just by being dynamite in your ownmarket.

So next time, we will talk about drilling down to what it isthat you do or what your product does and your strategic marketing plan. We willstart by clearly identifying what you do that directly benefits your customersegment(s).

Be sure to bookmark us or add us to your RSS feed for more installmentsof this post and other good stuff.

Social Media Marketing for Special Events

2012-02-14T14:14:00.000-08:00

One of the topics near and dear to our hearts here at Tenth Muse Creative is Social Media Marketing for Special Events. Our next series on this blog is on why social media marketing is important and how it can help you stretch your event marketing dollars.

Events are a shared spectacle, a form of social entertainment - a group of people comes together to experience a unique social opportunity. Using social media within this social setting is almost a no-brainer! Because understanding how powerful social media can be is so important, we really want to focus on sharing and what makes social media social.

The actual origins of the Internet was as a space for users to exchange information, and that is still true today. The Internet is more than just a place to prop up your online brochure (website), it is where your event attendees socialize and exchange information. The point of using social media for event marketing is for event producers to participate in the exchange – before the event – during the event - and after the event.

Social media for event marketing is NOT about blasting out a link to your website and reminding people about your event date. Social media marketing is about engaging your audience and making them a part of your marketing efforts through User Generated Content and information sharing. When you use social media correctly, your event fans become a part of your marketing strategy, not just a digital audience who is already awash in marketing messages, most of which they are ignoring in favor of user generated social marketing.

People who engage in social media are going to drive the “conversation” about your event, they are going to blog it, tweet it, post it, and share their impressions with other social media users. Social media users are the PR department you didn’t know that you had! If you work with your social users and engage them, they will deliver your messaging far more effectively and to more people than traditional advertising. When you engage social users, you are joining in the dialog, you are providing them with content that can be shared with other users and you are building relationships with people who like to share – and there are no better relationships to build than those.

Our next series of posts is going to look at social media platforms and how to engage your event attendees to create dynamic pre-event social interaction and during-event social opportunities that will vastly increase your event attendee enthusiasm and create a long tail marketing buzz.

Don’t forget to bookmark us as we dive into the pool of social media marketing for your special event!

Small Business Branding 101 – Lesson 2 What do you do?

2012-02-06T09:58:00.000-08:00

When we look deeper into Small Business Branding andMarketing, we find more and more questions to be answered that helps us craftour Small Business Marketing Plan. Thenext question we consider is What Do You Do?

We know What Business You Are In now, so what exactly do you do in that business? Today we will takea page from well-known sales guru BrianTracy and take an in-depth look at what you do.

When a new contact asks “what do you do?” your answer needsto be framed around the benefit to the customer, because the reality of peopleis that they are mostly interested in what the benefit is to them. If you canprovide them with a benefit they desire, suddenly ears perk up and you have aninterested prospect.

The wrong way to answer the question:

New Contact: “What do you do?”

You: “I’m a Chiropractor.”

Yawn. There’s no engagement here. There is no way for you totell automatically whether this person you are talking to is really interestedin your product/service.

The right way to answer the question:

New Contact: “What do you do?”

You: “I help people achieve better health and increased physicalmobility.”

Here is where you determine whether you have a new contactwho is a potential customer. The potential customer will notice a benefit tohim/her in the form of better health and physical mobility. If they areinterested in those benefits, you are most likely going to get a positiveresponse asking for more information.

New Contact: “Really? How do you do that?”

Now you get to detail your service/product offerings to anengaged prospect who has demonstrated an interest in the benefits you canprovide.

As we keep reminding you, people don’t buy products, theybuy solutions to problems.

Sell the solutions.

Small Business Branding 101 – Lesson 1

2012-01-24T15:31:00.000-08:00

After struggling a great deal with direction for where we want to go and what we want to accomplish with this blog, I think where I really want to dig in is two areas: conversations and branding. Logic suggests that it would be best to start with branding, since it’s hard to have a conversation about your business if you don’t really know what business you’re in – right?

So, today we will kick off with branding for small business and we are going to start from the beginning, because if your small business has been around for a while, it probably needs a brand refresh for the digital age. There are enormous advantages out there to small businesses that re-align their brand to who they really are and how customers/clients can expect to be treated, and those advantages shine their brightest when it comes to marketing your brand through social media.

Before we can market, we need to know what product/service we are selling. So, where do we start?

What Business are You in?

What do you do? What benefit do your customers receive from your company?

I read an article recently that quoted Theodore Levitt (Marketing Myopia) which discussed that in the 20th century, railroads lost out to air travel because they thought they were in the railroad business when instead they were actually in the transportation business of moving people and goods from point A to point B. Frankly, you see this all time. You can see it happening right now in the movie industry, which is myopically focusing on the idea that they are in the DVD distribution industry when they are actually in the entertainment industry. When your company focuses on the wrong parts of what you do, customers notice because attention to the real business slacks.

Knowing what business you are in is the #1 element to branding. What do you really do for your customers?

Get their car running again?
Prepare meals for them?
Provide them with tools?

What you ultimately do is solve a problem for them. Your customer needs lunch; your food service business provides it for them. A guy needs a new tire and you solve his transportation problem and get him back on the road. When you realize what business you are really in, it opens up all kinds of opportunities for solving your customers’ problems.

What problem does your business solve?

What benefits does your business provide to the customer?

One of our clients in the beauty industry recently realized that he isn’t in the Beauty Industry, he’s in the business of making people feel better about themselves. When you change up your direction like that, now you’ve got something to market. Market the benefit to the customer – because that’s really what the customer is interested in.

The benefit you provide is the business you are in.

Using Social Media to Engage your Customers

2012-01-20T09:34:00.000-08:00

A lot of small businesses are entering the world of socialmedia to help build their businesses and increase revenue as our economy beginsa slow recovery. This is a very exciting time to be joining the onlineconversation as this is one area where a small business has just as much advantageas a larger one. Our mission here at Tenth Muse Creative is to help smallbusinesses navigate the waters and enter this wonderfully level playing field.

First, let’s be clear: social media is not a one-wayconversation where your business attempts to sell via posting links to yourwebsite. What your customers (both existing and potential) want is a dialogwith your company. What customers want to know is how can you help them solvetheir problems? You need to start this process by listening to what their problemsare! It is long-standing wisdom in business that people don’t buy products orservices, they buy solutions to problems. You need to know the problems so youcan solve them for your customers.

So, over the next few blog posts we are going to take acloser look at conversations and how to engage with social media.

Our formula for engaging customers:

Find the right channel. Where is the right placeto have a conversation with your customers?
Listen. People will tell you almost anything youwant to know, if you would only listen.
Look for places to contribute. Can you answer aquestion? Solve a problem (without selling!)? Take the opportunity to buildyour reputation as the Answer Person.
Don’t sell. Nothing is a bigger turn off formost people than being sold to. What you want to be is a problem solver, notanother advertiser yelling “click me, click me!”

We will cover each of these steps in the formula over thenext couple of days; today we want to focus mostly on what it means to engage. Whenyou engage you are having a back and forth dialog, something we used to callrelationship building. Find common cause with your customers, find theirproblems, help them find solutions; celebrate their victories for they areyours as well.

When you engage with your customers in a conversation, youbecome part of their community and build goodwill. Being a part of thecommunity is what good citizens and businesses do; it engenders not onlyrespect but loyalty as well.

Engage in Conversations With Your Customers

What business doesn’t want the benefits of respect andloyalty from their customers? We knowyours does!

Welcome!

2012-01-13T09:47:00.000-08:00

This is the company blog for Tenth Muse Creative, a boutique marketing organization focused on small businesses who have heard the call to re-brand and join the Social Media age.

We will be blogging here on critical topics that small businesses should be aware of with regards to brand and Social Media, as well as providing our own tips and content templates to make certain your web and Social Media conversations are doing their best to elevate your brand and engage your customers.

Stop selling and start conversing!