The New Relationship Marketing

How to Build a Large, Loyal, Profitable Network Using the Social Web

Mari Smith

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781118063064
• eBook ISBN: 9781118135006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Marketing
• Index: Business

A top social media guru shares the secrets to expanding your business through relationships

People have always done business with people they know, like, and trust. That's the essence of "relationship marketing." Today, the popularity of online social networking has caused a paradigm shift in relationship marketing. This book helps businesspeople and marketers master this crucial new skill set. Social marketing expert Mari Smith outlines a step-by-step plan for building a sizable, loyal network comprised of quality relationships that garner leads, publicity, sales, and more.

If you're a businessman or businesswoman feeling the pressure to shift your approach to using social media marketing, to better understand the new soft skills required for success on the social web, and to improve your own leadership and relationship skills through emotional and social intelligence, this book is for you.

• Outlines how to become a significant "center of influence" for your customers and prospects
• Explains the unspoken rules of online etiquette—and the common "turnoffs" that drive customers and potential partners away
• Details the unique cultures of Facebook, Twitter, and other popular online platforms
• Shows exactly what to automate and delegate to build your social media persona, yet still retain the personal touch

Even if you currently have zero presence online, this book will help you see measurable results in a short time.

Part One

Relationship Marketing Basics

Chapter 1

How to Get Started in Relationship Marketing and Overcome Your (Perfectly Normal) Fears

To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

—Bertrand Russell

To help you get started with social media marketing, let's use the acronym P.O.S.T.—a concept developed by Forrester Research. As explained in the book Groundswell by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, P.O.S.T. helps to simplify and use a template for how to approach social marketing.¹

P Is for People

Where are your people? Are they mostly on Facebook? Are they on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google+? Are they on a completely different network that may be serving the Asian or European market? You need to do some research and find out if your target market uses a particular online social network more than any others. Before you can do this, however, you first need to be clear about who your target market is. Marketing professionals have long used psychographics to determine target markets—an analysis that consists of behaviors, trends, cultures, and ways of thinking attributed to certain geographic locations. With such a surge in online engagement, you can now also assess your target market based on technographics, a concept coined by Forrester Research and explained in Groundswell. Technographics is a composite picture of the type of people you're trying to reach, which networks they hang out on, and—perhaps most importantly—how you're going to reach them.

O Is for Objective

What do you wish to accomplish through new media marketing? What is your main goal here? Do you want to build your e-mail list and sell more products? Are you looking to just improve brand sentiment, or do you want to launch a new product or service? Are you interested in creating more demand or increasing existing registration numbers? Your overarching end result of your marketing needs to be clear.

S Is for Strategy

This is a step that people often miss entirely in the world of social and relationship marketing; they go straight to tools and tactics and overlook strategy. Many business owners get involved with social media as a result of peer and media pressure. They jump on board—often blindly—because they've heard about Facebook and Twitter on the news every day and have seen other companies using Facebook as their primary landing page. Unfortunately, they don't join the sites with any clear objectives in mind; sometimes they don't even know if their target market is engaged on those platforms. In short, they don't have a strategy. They just throw a page and profile together hastily and hope that somehow, something magical will happen.

You have to plan out your strategy and ensure that it's in alignment with your primary objective. For instance, when you set out to create your Facebook fan page, ask yourself how you will engage people. Will you run a contest to drive people there? Will you send out a broadcast message to your current e-mail list to persuade your subscribers to come over and join you? Will you let them know about a special offer that's available only to fans?

T Is for Technology

Many businesses get this entire P.O.S.T. system backward and are trying to work with T.S.O.P.—in other words, they begin their efforts with technology. They start by joining Twitter and Facebook and throwing together some semblance of a social profile. Their “strategy” might be to use automated systems or hired staff to help build fans and followers, because they heard somewhere that it's all about the numbers, and whoever has the biggest Klout² score wins. Unfortunately, most of these companies aren't even clear about how to use these social sites—and many haven't bothered to do the homework to figure out whether their target markets are even actively present on these sites.

However, it's hard to imagine that at least a cross section of your target market would not be on Facebook. As I'm writing this, Facebook has well over 700 million active users³ and is inching toward its first one billion members. With that number of people on one platform, it's almost guaranteed that your target market will be in there somewhere. Perhaps not every member and maybe not 100 percent—but it could be 20 percent or as much as 50 percent, with the remainder active on sites like LinkedIn and Twitter. Ad Age compiled the infographic shown in Figure 1.1⁴; this useful graphic serves to give you an overview of users on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Figure 1.1 The Demographics of Social Media

There are various tools you can use to research the demographics of your target market, such as Radian6.com and Research.ly, sites that allow you to identify the conversations and influencers that matter to your business. My favorite site for the latest Facebook statistics is SocialBakers.com.

See also the Resources section at the back of the book for more suggestions and visit RelationshipMarketingBook.com/free for an updated list of tools and helpful resources with live links.

Move from One-Way to Multiway Communication

As you read this book, you will learn about the nine steps to setting up and creating measurable results through relationship and social marketing. The true basics of how to get started are in these four elements: people, objective, strategy, and technology. However, business owners are often hesitant to move forward because they are, quite simply, afraid. It's perfectly normal to have fears about creating an online presence and establishing your brand on such viral platforms. After all, it really can feel like the whole world is watching you.

Prior to 2006 (when Facebook was made available to the public), business owners had the luxury of remaining quite private. We didn't have to live in a fishbowl and be completely exposed by consumers sharing everything and anything online. Although we conducted our business online, the only real two-way connection with clients and prospects was a contact form on our websites.

Then blogs—a forum that helps to create a more interactive two-way communication—began to increase significantly in popularity. Now your company can put up an article and openly invite people to leave their comments. Although this is an improvement and a step toward customer control, the company—for the most part—is still in charge.

Then, when social networking sites exploded, the invisible middleman disappeared. Brands no longer had to rely on only old media such as radio, TV, print, or even direct mail to reach their audience. Although e-mail marketing is still active—and should be integrated into an overall marketing plan—it's absolutely vital to include the social media aspect in all forms of your marketing. By having active social networking profiles and promoting them in all your marketing materials and anywhere your prospects and customers may be looking, you'll dramatically increase your “viral visibility.”

Conquer the Fear of Exposure—My Story

Courage is doing what you're afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you're scared.

—Eddie Rickenbacker

For me, the process of writing this book evoked the same fear you may face every day when marketing through social media—a fear of exposure. I was painfully shy throughout most of my school years. My least favorite subject involved reading aloud. I would shrink down in my chair to make myself less visible, hoping the teacher wouldn't call on me. However, I did very well academically and ended up skipping a grade in elementary school in Canada, which allowed me to graduate at a younger age. I then moved to Scotland, and while my peers were all graduating high school at age 16 going on 17, I joined them at age 15 going on 16—and went straight into the workforce. I wasn't attracted to attending college at the time.

Fortunately, I began to gain confidence as an adult and also developed a thirst for further education. I attended evening classes, became very active in the speaking club Toastmasters, and discovered Lee Glickstein's Speaking Circles in later years. What I loved about Speaking Circles was th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise for The New Relationship Marketing
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: What Is the New Relationship Marketing, and Why Is It Crucial to Businesses Today?
• Part One: Relationship Marketing Basics
• Part Two: Nine Steps to Significantly Growing Your Business Through Relationship Marketing
• Conclusion How to Adapt as Technology Changes: The Future of Relationship Marketing
• Notes
• Resources
• Index