For this week’s “Marketer’s Spotlight” I had the privilege to ask Tim Mayneord, CEO of socialplatform.co.uk a few questions about his views on social media and email marketing.
What is Socialplatform.co.uk, where is it located, and how did it get its start?
With social media taking over the world how does Social Platform help businesses build the right strategy for them? What are some of the basic steps for a strong social strategy?
We work closely with our clients to understand who their target market is. We are surprised by the amount of business’s who overlook the basics and actually forget their “target avatar”, all too often they seem to be chasing their competitors clients. If we ignore basic principles of marketing, social media or any other for of lead generation for that matter will have little or no effect, it is really important to define a strategy through a process which really forces our clients to consider all elements of their business so we look at existing customer base profiling in addition to desired prospects, brand positioning, product propositioning in addition to competitor analysis. Remember the 3Ms Market, Message, Media -and its always in that order!
On your website it seems you focus on finding a real balance. What are mistakes you see your customer making before they come to you that throw off the balance?
Have you ever traded a car into a garage and 2 days later seen it on the forecourt, so clean you want to buy it back? The point is, you can clean a car but you are not able to valet it, you just don’t have the expertise or equipment to achieve a super deep clean and an “as new” paint shine. Most business leaders think they are able to achieve reach beyond their dreams, winning new fans, followers and ultimately build their list with quality leads, now to be fair to them, they probably could IF they had the right tools, resource and time – fact is they don’t! So the majority of our clients are those who have either tried a DIY approach and quickly realized that, if they are going to get serious, Social Media is well beyond “Billy in the bedroom” or they have realized that there is a world out there and that social channels are not full of kids.
With social media having many different channels, do you think people need to use all of them?
We’re back the to the 3Ms again. When you know your market and the message you want to broadcast we can then and not until then concentrate on the media, we use a hashtag to promote how and why we do what we do – #notonesizefitsall. One of the reasons we have adopted this is because we don’t believe that business need to necessarily use every channel, if your target market [sector] is not consuming information through Facebook for example then don’t waste your time using it, there is just no point, its a waste of energy, enthusiasm and money.
What role do you see email marketing playing along side of email marketing? What are a couple of ways you see them use successfully together?
Email marketing is a key component for our clients, why wouldn’t it be? We need to get one thing straight, Social Media has not replaced anything else its just something that needs to be done as well as traditional techniques, we also need to keep firmly in mind the consumption of information through segmented email. Everyone knows that people buy from businesses they know, like and trust. Think of your social media activity as being a tool to [really] segment your client and prospect base. You see through deep analytics and profiling you can really understand more about the people you engage and interact with, which then mean your list can be segmented with pin point accuracy, then, you can communicate to your audience with information of products or offers you know they will be interested in – your audience will open read and share the email you send just as long as it relevant. Use social media to promote offers and free downloads/white papers etc to build your list.
Within Mautive, what of the functions do you see as value adding to your customer and why?
All of our clients are reaping benefits from automated campaigns, most of which feature multi-level segmentation and CTA (call to action) triggers through to their linked CRM solutions. Most of our customers considered email marketing as being simply a bunch of sales letters which were sent out on mass and simply did not understand how powerful and dynamic a structured and complete clients ownership program can be and importantly how easy it is to maintain!
Can you please share with me 3 tips or strategies for being successful with social media and email within a business?
- Know your market, make sure you sync’ your data too
- Grow your list & grow your engagement.
- Create compelling content – remember, we believe people like share and comment on anything as log as its relevant and in context.
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