Posts Tagged ‘social marketing plan’
Quick Tip of the Week: Integrating Outlook and LinkedIn
There is a new feature offered by Outlook and LinkedIn where, if you use Microsoft Outlook, you can now have more insight into the people with whom you email. Basically, once you download the application, you will see a summary of the contact’s most recent LinkedIn activity, status updates, accepted connections and e-mails. You can sort these updates by news feed updates and RSS articles about this person; If you are not yet connected on LinkedIn, you can click “Add” to add them to your network.
This feature is a great way to keep closer tabs on your LinkedIn network, and is helpful in building your marketing lists, as well!
To learn more about this integration and to download the feature, click here.
Quick Tip of the Week: Protect Against Plagiarism
With so many professionals using social media and posting articles, blogs, and ebooks today, part of your social media strategy should be making sure that nobody else is plagiarizing the work you submit online – and, also, that the work you submit is not already out there, so that you don’t get accused of plagiarism. If you outsource any of your social media plan, having a tool to occasionally check what is being submitted under your name is especially helpful. Check out www.copyscape.com, where you can enter search terms or your own blog page, for example, and see whether or not others are taking credit for your work.
You could also use that site as part of your online reputation management strategy. What if someone has a running negative commentary regarding your blog or your practice? You’d find such a site using a tool like CopyScape. Consider implementing a site like this into your social media strategy, to protect the content you work so hard to produce.
The Era of Value-Driven Marketing
Marketing is moving into a new era – the era of Value-Driven Marketing
The reason is that unlike traditional marketing, the purpose of value-driven marketing is to create meaningful value to your clients. By providing quality value on a consistent basis utilizing social media marketing, you will become the “go-to” lawyer for your community when they are ready for estate planning. An added bonus is that you will cultivate lifetime client loyalty and your clients, in essence, become your sales team by directing prospects to you.
There are a few key points in value-driven marketing that you should embrace:
- Value-driven marketing requires a deep desire to serve. Since you have chosen to practice in estate planning I’m guessing this point describes you exactly! But, it needs to move beyond ‘desire’ to a system that demonstrates this to your prospects. It requires a daily commitment to seek ways to add value to your clients’ lives. Social media provides the means, but you must commit to the process and provide great content on a consistent basis.
- To create value, you must know your prospects and clients. It is important for you to understand exactly who you are speaking to – what motivates them, their decision criteria, etc. This is easily accomplished by thoroughly researching your prospects and then setting objectives and developing a comprehensive strategy.
- Value-driven marketing does not produce results overnight. Value-driven marketing is about building relationships – and relationships take time to develop. You can’t expect to throw a lot of money at a big marketing campaign and expect people to instantly trust you or see you as an expert. Your prospects are very savvy and somewhat distrustful of those old-fashioned, in-your-face, tactics. Instead, commit to small acts to build solid relationships with them.
While on its face, value-driven marketing may seem daunting, it is important to note that it will result in driving new clients to your law practice. The speed at which your relationships develop depend upon how much time and resources you plan to devote. If you set an aggressive schedule for blog posting and participation in social networks then you will see results rather quickly. While it is important for you to be very involved in your social media strategy, it is not necessary for you to do everything yourself. You can outsource many social media marketing strategies to free your time.
The answer is simply to commit to providing great content that has good value and you will see the results!
Social Media Strategy Step Three – Building a Realistic Plan
Now that you know why you should be using social media to grow your business and you now know who you’d like to speak to, it’s time to ask the next obvious question.
How?
The thing about social media marketing is that you can’t do it haphazardly and expect results. You must have a plan that allows your marketing to be methodical and persistent.
This is very different from traditional marketing where it was possible to throw a whole lot of money and do a big campaign once per month or once per quarter. Developing online relationships and establishing yourself as an industry expert is much like developing offline relationships. It’s the small things that matter. More importantly, it’s consistently being there for your audience.
Your plan should include all of the pieces of your strategy and might look something like this:
- Post to your blog twice per week
- Monitor and comment on competitors/collaborators blogs once per day
- Review Facebook fan page and profile once per day and comment where appropriate
- Review Twitter and participate 3 times per day
- Write an article twice per month and submit to online article directories
- Write a press release once per month and submit
- Review LinkedIn groups once per day and review Question/Answers area using pre-determined keywords.
Here at Attorney Social Media Marketing we develop matrices to help our clients track their participation, which our clients find very helpful in keeping them on track. It can also be helpful in determining how effective each element of the plan is in growing their online presence.
Just like any project, a good solid plan is a strong foundation on which social media marketing can help grow your business. Don’t forget this critical step!
Social Media Stategy Step Two: Identify Your Objectives
While it is most certainly true that you would like to build your law practice using social media, it is important to focus in more closely to identify your social media objectives. Now it is time to teach you what social media marketing is NOT.
Social networks are NOT a place to sell. Social networks are for building relationships.
Social media marketing is about getting into the mind of the consumer. Today’s consumer no longer responds to ‘push’ marketing. They don’t want to be told what to buy. They want to make their own decisions about the products they buy and the services they use. The ‘selling’ aspect on social media is much more subtle than in traditional channels. Smart Estate Planning attorneys realize that prospects want to be educated, inspired, or entertained. Therefore, it is critical that your objectives be something like:
- Position yourself as a subject matter expert
- Be a conduit for your community’s questions about Estate Planning
- Build your brand and manage your reputation
These types of objectives go a long way towards giving you a strong ROI – Return on Influence, that is. Return on Influence is measured using different benchmarks than the quantitative Return on Investment. Returns on Investment benchmarks are specific, measurable, and quantitative. Return on Influence has more to do with brand authority and your growing levels of engagement and influence in the social media channels. Some examples of Return on Influence measures are:
- 200 new Twitter Followers over the past 3 months
- 50 participants in Facebook Group
- Growth in conversations about business on Twitter and Facebook
- 100 new subscribers to your blog
So while the Return on Influence measures can be quantitative, the direct impact on your Return on Investment is more subtle. But, it definitely has an impact. Having new Twitter followers doesn’t guarantee that all 200 will be calling your office, but maybe 20 will, having a positive effect on your bottom line! The more you put your name out there, the higher that number can become. And there are several good tools on the web that you can use to track your Return on Influence.
Bottom line: if you have a clear social media objective, mapping out your strategy becomes clear, tracking your results is clear, and the impact on both your Return on Influence AND Return on Investment becomes clear, as a result of the time and effort you’ve put into your social media strategy.
