Bestselling author, award winning brand marketing and social media pro, Cindy Ratzlaff, creates sales driving campaigns for authors, books and publishers.
A strategic alliance is a relationship between two (or more) parties to pursue a set of agreed upon goals or to meet a critical business need while remaining separate businesses or entities. Partnering with people or companies who have a similar customer base must benefit both parties equally and have full commitment buy-in from each partner. When planned and executed properly, a strategic alliance can exponentially increase the success of a campaign or launch.
A consulting client recently confessed to me that his Facebook news stream is overwhelming him and he’s ready to give up on the brand visibility strategy we’ve outlined for building his personal brand through social media. I asked him to make a list of the top 25 people he’d most like to do business with, be on stage with or have as a strategic partner. He was able to make that list in just minutes, of course, because when he focused on his business goal, it was easy to identify those people most likely to be a part of that goal. This social media strategy technique saves him time daily.
I showed him how to put each of those top 25 influencers into a Facebook Interest List, which we called A-List Influencers. Now he can filter his news stream each morning and quickly scan the posts of the people he most wants to connect with and add to their conversations, comment, compliment, create value and in general develop a relationship with these highly desirable contacts. Facebook will always revert back to the standard news feed view but any time he wants to check in on his A-List Influencers, he can do so with just a click.
We’ve been told that selling through social media is a no-no and that at best we should keep it to the 80/20 rule; 80% engagement and 20% sales. Heck, I’ve even said that in the past. Now I’m proposing we rethink the concept of sales altogether and throw the 80/20 rule out the window.
In the early phase of building a social media platform for any brand, personal or business, we focus on likes, follows, friends, fans and subscribers as a metric for measuring whether or not a brand message is hitting an eager audience. That’s still a valid thing to measure and a brand that can’t gather a tribe in a pool of more than a billion social media users simply may not have a marketable idea.
Take a deep breath. On NBC-TV’s The Today Show, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo announced sweeping redesign to the Twitter platform with a focus on the look of Profile pages and a significant update to the mobile and iPad apps.
The Profile Look: Profile’s will feature a large Header Photo on the right hand side that might remind some users of the look and feel of Facebook.
Finding your brand voice or your entrepreneurial message is a fundamental building block for growing a successful, profitable and sustainable revenue stream for your business.
Understanding and implementing strong, clear messages is easier when you have identified your entrepreneurial voice. There are several different voices with which a business can communicate and choosing one can help you get from the idea stage to the starting line. You’ll add additional voices and messages as your company, product or service matures, but since the start is the most challenging hurdle in any entrepreneur’s business life cycle, let’s examine some options that will get you to go.
I once had a boss who asked me why we published so many books that were not bestsellers. He wanted to know why we didn’t just publish the bestselling ones and reject the rest. It was a naive question, but one that crops up in every industry. Why don’t we all just launch the profitable ideas and not the mistakes? Shouldn’t there be a way to determine if a product or service or book will succeed before we invest time, money and resources in launching?
There isn’t a truly foolproof solution or we’d all be rich, no book would go unread, every product would have thousands of raving fans and marketing would be pointless. But there are questions that publishers and Fortune 500 companies alike ask themselves before they invest in materials, resources, marketing and everything else that goes into bringing a product or service from the idea stage to the marketplace. And, entrepreneurs need to ask themselves those same questions before they launch because their time, money and resources are their primary investment start up tools.
Every day thousands of fantastic articles and marketing ideas for entrepreneurs and small business owners come streaming onto the web, and throughout social media. What’s a busy entrepreneur to do. You can’t read everything. You can email yourself great links to articles you want to read later or save the links to a private circle on G+ or even bookmark them for handy reference. I use the G+ strategy most of the time and add sites that regularly deliver to my Google Reader account.
For those who haven’t yet figured out how to scan the headlines and save the best for later, here are a few ideas are so creative and useful that I want to make sure you don’t miss them. I’ve added short introductory paragraph to tell you why they’re worth your time to click through and read and possibly save. But all of these have ideas that you can use, right now, to amp up the action on your marketing.
I received an email from someone recently asking me for ideas on how they can begin developing their personal branding even though they don’t yet have a business plan or a fully imagined business idea. I was impress they were thinking about branding at this stage of their business development and the question got me thinking about how we can all set up foundational brand elements now that will serve us as we grow an idea into a business.
But how can we brand something that doesn’t exists, you ask? We can’t. But I believe that you are always the brand. So you can and should begin to articulate what the brand of “you” includes.
Facebook’s Promoted Posts launched this morning and the starting price for promoting an individual post is $15.00 and the choices go up to $300.00. According to Facebook, “when you promote a post, it will be shown in the news feeds of more of the people who like your Page than you would reach normally. Friends of the people who have interacted with your post will also be more likely to see the story in their news feeds for up to 3 days from when the post was first created.”
Facebook estimates your $15.00 promoted post will be served up to 2,100 people more than would have seen it through the regular Edgerank system. You can change the lifetime budget even after publication.
Entrepreneurs not only create a product or service and become their own Chief Marketing Officer, Publicity Director and Head of Sales. Many entrepreneurs are not, however, comfortable with the sales end of business.
If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. There are countless trainings and teachers who can teach you their own step by step guides to identifying leads, pitching the product or service and closing the deal. But without a fundamental shift in the way the entrepreneur views his or her own value, the sales cycle will still stand as a huge challenge; a personal boulder in the road to success.