Month: June 2016

Social Media

Which Social Media Channel Suits The Best For Your Need?

JoyceLeave a comment

There are thousands of articles talking about social media online. You can easily find all the information about social media, what builds the traffic, what builds the brand, what needs to invest more than the other. Ideally, I want to own ALL! Because the big brands, the successful bloggers do that. They have accounts on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, snapchat, etc. They feed customized content in each channel. Who doesn’t want that kind of marketing?  Too bad, you are a small business owner, you can’t afford that.

Don’t be frustrated, you still have a chance. So how to find the right one, how to filter all kinds of social channels in the market? You have to know your product and service first (of course!), and your customers too, since they might stay in one channel rather than the other – you need to choose the one they like!

It’s so easy to get lost in tons of social media channels. Each one is unique and fun. If you are producing a traditional product or service, I would suggest Facebook and Pinterest. These two drive traffic! And cover relatively larger and older audience (who have money to pay). Plus, you don’t really need to create customized content for both channels (of course, if you can, that will be much better). Instagram and snapchat are hot and young, if your service and product are trendy/ edgy, I would go for these 2 channels. YouTube would be a good place too, if you produce videos regularly. After all, you need to test. You might find one that really surprises you!

Marketing

What Is The Smartest Way To Do Marketing?

JoyceLeave a comment

Well, I think the smartest way is to have someone pay for your marketing, and at the same time you are making sales on it.:)

Making hand crafted greeting cards is one of my hobbies, so I have several stamps/paper stores that I usually shop in the local. My favorite stamp store is small, locating inside a busy shopping mall closed to a university (location is the key).  It sells stamps, but also sells blank cards, paper, inks, color pens, and some crafting tools, all the hand crafted card accessories. I like everything there, but my favorite part is the classes! The store has different kinds of classes to show people how to use stamps, paper, colors and tools to make cards!  They have hundreds of stamps in the store. I enjoy browsing all the cute little stamps, and the sample cards created by those stamps. However, too many choices are not always good. It is hard for a consumer, like me, who doesn’t really have a target before I get into the store.

So those classes are essential to drive sales. I didn’t interview the owner, I didn’t know how much sales she/he made a month, but I was the one paid $35-50 for one and half hour class. Before or after the class, I usually spend at least another 20 bucks to buy the stuff I will use/used in the class. I also invited friends to join classes with me. I, as a consumer, paid for the marketing and make sales for the store. Think about they can take as many as 10 people per one class, and 1-2 classes a day…

There were 3 local stamp/paper stores I shopped a lot before 2010. During the economy recession, one got shut down. That one was a chain store. It is easy to understand, when people lose jobs, who care about crafting? Those leisure/hobby type of stores are the ones get hit the most when economy goes down. However, that little tiny store has survived, and it has a lot more classes now.:)

 

Marketing

When To Send Emails To Your Users

JoyceLeave a comment

I used to advocate sending notification to users to increase website engagement. Similar to Facebook, send an email to a user to tell her who commented on her post and who updated the status, and expect the user to click on the email and engage on the website. I think this is a genius idea, every UGC website should do that. However, when I think more, it is not worth of doing if most of the website content are not submitted by the users and the amount of subscribers are not significant, because the actions on non user submitted content won’t trigger any emails. And if not enough subscribers or activities on the website, the triggered emails will be very limited. Even though some users would click back to the website, but the engagement is not going to move the needle. The whole service is wasted.

When we think about using email to increase traffic, we have to check the percentage of activities from subscribers over the amount of website content first. For example, you have 1000 articles on the website, but only have 1000 subscribers, daily activities from subscribers are not much. Instead of thinking to use email marketing, it might be better spend the time on SEO, social exposure, and website feature enhancement, etc. Email marketing requires huge amount of resource, from research, design, test, deliver, analyze to improve, then run through the whole cycle again. Plus you have to pay for the email service!

So the idea, sending notifications to users is genius, when you have the substantial amount of subscribers and relatively high engagement on the site.