Social Media Marketing; Your Blog is the Center Hub

We have written before that the Directional Flow of Marketing Has Changed. No longer does buying a larger block of advertising work so well at increasing sales. If you harness Social Marketing, it can have an extraordinary reach for your product or business.

But Where to Start

Glenda Watson Hyatt has a great graph over on her blog titled Mapping My Social Empire, and does a nice job of illustrating how her blog is the center of her media empire with seven smaller territories

The directional numbers represent Glenda’s actions

1. Manually Tweet the blog post, bring readers back to the blog
2. New blog posts are automatically added to facebook
3. Tweets are fed automatically to facebook
4. LinkedIn profile brings readers to the blog, it theory
5. Videos posted to You Tube bring people to the blog
6. Manually Stumbling posts brings readers to the blog
7. Blog posts are automatically sent to email subscribers
8. TweetMeme on the blog enables readers to share the post easily
9. TweetMeme is also embedded in the email broadcast

Your Blog is the Center of Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

The above referenced is a pretty solid plan to increase and expand your digital reach. If you use this strategy consistently, your digital footprint will expand over time. the key though is consistent posting of relevant content.

The good news about all of this is, it really isn’t all that complicated. If you are a start up or a small business you can do it yourself. These Internet marketing services can also be outsourced. Either way, both take time, and creating a Long Tail doesn’t unfold overnight.

Does increased web traffic result to increased sales?

Our Guest Post today comes from Jennifer Kennedy, Technology and Operations Specialist at Property Counselors Management Group in Fort Myers, Fl. Jennifer, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and getting the conversation going surrounding web traffic and apartment communities!

Here is Jennifer’s post;

Measuring Web  Traffic

This topic came up on the January 5^th blog talk radio Apartment Marketing Gone Digital. I was inspired by the comment made in relation to traditional property tours.  As an industry we have a standard expectation that if a certain number of prospects walk through the door we expect our teams to close and lease a certain amount of apartments, thereby know how much traffic we need to generate to reach our occupancy goals.  However, how do we measure our website traffic? How much traffic do I need to generate to my property website to secure a lease?

Apartment operators and owners need to answer these questions for their business, and the way to measure website leads will vary from company to company depending on the marketing of their websites and the way the sites themselves are organized.  For PCMG the property websites are both for prospects and residents.   Based on the dual roles for our sites, when it comes to generating leads we look solely to new visits to our site that resulted in an online guest card.  We found that as a company 5% of new visitors completed a guest card.  We had one site as low as 1% and one as high as 10%, but the majority hovered around 5%.   Five percent sounds low until you put it in the perspective that our average number of new visitors to our website is 237.

This information generated a new set of questions.  How can I make 10% the standard?  What did my site that hit 10% do differently?  Was the traffic generated from different sources than my other properties?   Answer these questions and you now know what sources deserve the most resources allocated to them.  There are so many mediums that can be utilized to push traffic to your site it is paramount to determine where your time and money should be spent.

I urge you to start measuring today!  Complete an analysis that is appropriate for the purpose of your site.   As an industry we have to start measuring the effectiveness of our sites in order to progress and continue to take online leasing to the next level.  If we don’t have a measure for our online efforts, we will never know the extent of their success.

Engagement; A Lost Art

We speak of Engagement with the customer today as if that is something new, but it really is just a Lost Art. I grew up in a small rural farming community in mid state Ohio. My father was a home builder. We lived on a small farm that my grandfather and father sort of farmed.

Where Everybody Knows Your Name

The closet town was a few miles away. Way before 24/7 grocery stores, the ones that used to close by 6:00 PM and just sold groceries, AND they bagged AND carried your groceries to the trunk of your car. The owner of the store was also the head butcher. Whenever we would go to the grocery store my folks were always greeted by first name, seemingly by everyone in the store. But the piece I remember the most was that the store owner “Knew” our family, all of us, and knew lot’s of things about us, including exactly how my dad liked his cut of meat.

The biggest takeaway from all of this was the Experience, in a time when creating that happened as a part of the business exchange, and not a targeted strategy.

Are Those Days Gone

Certainly lots 0f Brands are working hard to create and execute a Customer Experience. Will the days of the grocer knowing the cut of meat ever return, well, maybe.

Think about Amazon, Netflix, iTunes, they all know me pretty well, and they know individually other of our family members, at least based on our preferences. They have enacted a different form of Engagement, and I can even reciprocate with comments and reviews.

We Are Connecting Again
We returning to those old days of Engagement, albeit it may not look exactly the same. Think about blogs, (we do that here at Digital Sherpa you know, LOL) Blogs allow a two way conversation, and a rich interaction with the followers and commentators, and Your Customers, and Your Competitors Customers.

And there is another thing, a pretty important one too, the Internet allows like minded folks to connect and organize at hyper speed, literally with a single click. It does that by scanning for “keywords and phrases”, henceforth that whole world of SEO (Search Engine Optimaxzation) has unfolded.

The Internet, allows your Company Blog to be a super charged Outreach Machine. Provide some great and value driven content on your Blog, and guess what Shows Up, Engagement!

The ROI of Social Media Marketing

DigitalSherpa is a service of Network Communications, Inc. and the company’s Chairman & CEO, Dan McCarthy, has been an early adopter of social media as an internet marketing strategy. In his blog, ViralHousingFix, Dan has shared many of his observations about the application of social media to marketing and has articulated some foundation principles.  To better understand DigitalSherpa’s approach to social media marketing and to gain additional perspective, you may want to read Dan’s following posts:

ROI of social media marketing: 3 case studies

Winning at search (small and medium sized businesses)

Explosive growth of social media: A visual experience

Demographics of online social behavior

Video: Fact-based, compelling — social media growth