Mindshare Web Marketing Mentors

I remember the days before cell phones.  Remember when you needed to wait until your friend returned home from the beach, or from thier cross-town visit with Aunt Bernice?

Those days are long gone!

It seems everyone has cell phones these days.  Everyone from six and seven year olds all the way to 90 year old grannies!  Some of you may be shaking your heads and thinking, “What is this world coming to?  We made it without cell phones, why can’t they?!?”

Guess what?

Every time you make that statement or think that thought you are wasting your time.  Things are NOT going to reverse, and people won’t return those cell phones.  So … accept it!  :)

As business people we need to recognize the tremendous opportunity we are presented with.  With the emergence of text messaging, we now have an opportunity to reach our prospective customers with messages at the exact moment they are looking to buy.

The following are five steps you can use to effectively market your business with the use of text messaging.  For the purpose of this article I’ll use a restaurant as an example.

Step One – Create a Diner’s Club

Humans are born with a NEED to belong.  If you look around you’ll see the most successful companies focus on this need and fill it.  That’s why there are loyalty programs, frequent flyer programs, buying clubs, and an association for any possible niche in the world.  The bottom line is people are natural joiners so give them a way to JOIN and become affiliated with your business.

Step Two – Create an Offer

Don’t be naive and think that just because you started a “Diner’s Club” that everyone will simply join.  Keep in mind that along with emerging technology comes more information than anyone can possibly consume.  This is making your customers think a bit longer about what they sign up for and if there isn’t something valuable for them, they simply won’t join.

Make sure that you specify exactly what they will get.  Will they get a “buy one get one” offer, or a free desert upon joining?  Will they also get a free dinner on their birthday, and a dinner for two on their anniversary?  Will they get “Diner’s Club Members ONLY” special discounts throughout the month?

The what isn’t as important as the value.  Your objective is to motivate them to send a text message to your special number which will automatically enroll them in your “Cell Phone Mailing List,”  so make sure the offer is something you feel has a great enough value that you would sign up for it yourself.

Step Three – Advertise Your Club

Once you’ve created your club, and created an irresistible offer, it’s time to let your customers know about it.  Whether you create table tents, send a mailing to your “snail mail” list, send out an email blast, or have a contest among your waitstaff where you reward the person who gains the most new members for the month.  Just make sure you have a solid advertising plan to get the word out.

Step Four – Send Updates … Not SPAM

Once you’ve followed the previous three steps and have built up your membership base, it’s time to send out your updates.  Make sure you don’t ruin all the hard work you’ve done by spamming your list.  Make sure the updates you send out have valuable offers that are irresistible to your members.

The best way to utilize this list is to send out offers on slower days of the week.  If you happen to live in a climate that has very snowy days, send out an offer where your “Club Members” receive a FREE dinner if they come in that evening.  The nice thing is people don’t normally eat alone.  They’ll probably bring someone with them and it may be their entire family.

Step Five – Engage Your Members

As your membership base grows it will be important to engage your members with contests, and by sending out other useful or entertaining information.  Maybe it’s a joke of the week, a quote of the month, or an occasional link to a funny article you’ve read.  It doesn’t really matter what it is as long as it engages and entertains your members.

They’ll appreciate it if they receive information from you that isn’t ONLY asking them to spend money.

The more technology advances, the more opportunities we’ll have to engage our customers EVERYWHERE!  It’s important as business owners and marketers to stay on top of technology and take advantage of these incredible opportunities.

It doesn’t matter what type of business you have, if you use your imagination you can come up with ways to market your business with text messaging. Just be creative and you will put yourself and your company in a position to win.

Let’s face it, the Internet has changed the world and no matter what type of business you have, YOU NEED to figure out how to use it for your company.

I don’t think there’s a business owner or marketing manager alive who hasn’t realized they need to include the Internet in their marketing efforts.  If there does happen to be one or two left out there who still feel the Internet just doesn’t work for their business, I’m quite sure they are spending their last few days as a relevant business or marketing person.  :)

Since the advent of Web 2.0 all the buzz online is about building community and using the web to engage the visitors who arrive on your website.  Well what about companies that need to get people through their doors in order to provide their products or services to them?

Is there still a way for these offline businesses to capitalize on all this web 2.0 stuff?

YES THERE IS!

Let’s take a restaurant for example.   There is really no substitute to getting your customers inside your doors so they can experience the atmosphere, the service, and taste the delectable delights that your top notch chef prepares each day.

Although this is correct, there are still ways for you to build an online community with these offline customers.

Think about it …

How many times have you wondered what the daily special was on your favorite restaurant’s menu?

Have you ever found yourself trying to find a new place in town to try but you wanted to find out what other people thought of the menu?

What if your favorite restaurant typically has entertainment in the lounge?  Who is performing?

These are just a few different pieces of information a prospective diner might find themselves seeking the answer to.  If you happen to own a restaurant, are you giving your customers an easy way to gain access to these answers?

If you are expecting your customers to simply pick up the phone and give you a call you may be missing the boat.  In fact, how do you know if they even know your phone number?

Let’s just look at the facts …

The last time I checked I found that over 80% of the people in the USA have at least one email address.  I am quite sure the 20% who don’t are probably not in a position to visit your restaurant anyhow!

The following are three steps you can take to begin to build a community for the people who visit your restaurant.

Ask Every Diner for Their Email Address

If you want to improve your chances of gaining this valuable piece of information, you need to make sure you are providing some type of value.  Maybe you can offer a 10% discount on their current bill or maybe a free desert.  It doesn’t need to be a very expensive offering, but it does need to be something that makes it worth them taking the chance that you won’t fill their inbox with a bunch of unwanted garbage.

Start a Diner’s Club (or something named a bit more creatively)

It’s a human need for people to belong.  Why not give your customers something to belong to?  Who wouldn’t be thrilled to receive a free meal on their birthday or a dinner for two on their anniversary?

Remember how you’ve found yourself wondering what specials were being offered at your favorite restaurant?  Well if you were a member of their Diner’s Club and you received an email each week notifying you of those specials you would always be “in the know.”

What if by joining the Diner’s Club you had an opportunity to get preferred seating in the quiet part of the restaurant, right in front of the beautiful field stone fireplace?

Be creative!  The more creative you are, the more successful you’ll be at building your community and ultimately … your sales!

Send Periodic Emails with Valuable Content … DON’T SPAM!

If you are sending one email per week with your weekly specials, why not include a great recipe they can try at home?  If your Diner’s Club members are at all like me, they’d rather visit your restaurant and have you make it for them, but they’d be very pleased that you cared enough to give them the option.

You don’t have to limit it to recipes either.  If your restaurant is known for excellent service, include a series of articles on how to host first class dinner parties in your home.  This type of content shows your “members” that you aren’t just interested in getting them in your restaurant so you can get their cash.  It shows them you care about them as a person, and not just a person with a wallet or purse!

These are just a few steps you can follow to begin to create an online community for your offline customers.  If you aren’t a restaurateur,  use this example to explore your brain for similar ideas in your business.

I find it strange how it’s possible to go from having a difficult time grasping the concept of something, to finding endless ways to use it in a matter of a few months!

That’s exactly what happened to me when it came to Twitter.  

I guess I shouldn’t be so surprised since I am involved in an industry where something we couldn’t possibly conceive one day … can change the world in that same few months.

Today I’d like to chat a little about how you can use Twitter to identify hot prospects and begin a conversation with them that can lead to the beginnings of a strong relationship.  Not only that, but you can accomplish this without leaving your desk, and without even picking up your phone!

Step One – Identify Hot, Profitable Keywords

If you are new to the online world you might be saying to yourself, “HUH?!?!?  How the heck do I do that?”

The best way is to brainstorm to come up with a broad keyword that your buyers might type in to find you.  

For example, if you are a website development company, and you checked the Google Keyword Tool , you’d find the keyword “Web Development” is searched for an average of 823,000 times per month.  That’s a pretty hot keyword as far as search volume, but also, the people who are using this keyword to search have commercial intent nearly 90% of the time.  

It isn’t exclusively about search volume,  it’s much better to go after highly targeted buyers that are READY TO BUY.  

Step Two –  Identify People with Needs

Now that you’ve identified your hot, profitable keyword, it’s time to find people who have needs related to this keyword.  Twitter has recently added a search box on the right hand side of your page when you login.  

Once you are logged in all you have to do is enter your keyword inside quotations ( “web development” ) and click the little magnifying glass next to it.  Once you’ve done this you will be presented with “Real Time Results” with the most recent updates first.

Step Three – Listen to What They are Telling You

The next step is to review each result and quickly evaluate whether you can help them or not.  The beauty of this search feature is that there will constantly be new results coming in so this one search could keep you busy all day and you’ll never run out of people to help!  

The system won’t automatically dump them onto your screen which is good.  Once you’ve pored through the most recent results you simply need to look at the top of your results and it will tell you how many new results have come in and click “refresh” to see them.

Step Four – Deliver VALUE and Don’t be That Guy (or Gal)

Remember PART ONE of this series where we talked about the sales person who attends the networking events and runs around the room “glad handing” everyone and cramming their business card in each person’s hand without allowing the person to say one word?

Don’t be that guy!

Evaluate each of the results you are presented and ask yourself, “What are they asking for and how can I help?”  Their “Tweet” is an invitation to begin a conversation, not an invitation to apply some aggressive closing technique.  

Using the Web Development example, you might want to create a report on “How to Plan for and Develop a Successful Website.”  If you see they are thinking about developing a new site you might want to reply and send them a link to this FREE report.  If they have a question about something to do with their website, perhaps you could answer their question.

Keep in mind that as you are replying to these people your replies are visible on your profile page, and the content could possibly show up when others are conducting searches of their own.  This will help you build credibility and display your expert knowledge within your industry.

Please let me know if you’ve used Twitter in a similar fashion, or if you have any other examples of how to use Twitter for your business.

I HATE spam just as much as you do I promise!  I already receive over 100 legitimate emails each day and if you were to add the amount of spam messages I get I’d say the number would be closer to 1,000.

 Thank God for spam filters!

If you couple this hatred with the fact that I wholeheartedly believe in working hard to attract highly targeted visitors to your website and not simply build traffic simply for the sake of building traffic, you may find it difficult to believe how I fell into the trap … that is unless you’ve fallen in the trap as well.

Here is how it all happened …

Way, way back in early 2008 I heard of this crazy website called Twitter.  I am sure you had the same type of thoughts I did when I first checked it out.

You thought …

“Boy that’s kinda dumb!

or

“Why would anyone care if I had to use the bathroom?”

Well I can tell you I had no intention of returning to the site since I just couldn’t get a grasp of why anyone would care what I was  doing at any given second of the day.  

I continued on living my life, and anytime I heard someone mention Twitter I kinda chuckled and thought to myself, “boy they need to get a life and maybe keep their bathroom habits to themselves.”

One day a few short months later I was getting my car serviced and was sitting in the waiting room at the dealership.  I looked up at the TV and saw CNN was on the screen.  After listening to a few seconds of thier literal blathering  I began to  lose interest and began looking around the room for an interesting magazine to read.

…And then it happened!

I heard the CNN commentator telling the audience how they could send in their “tweets” and he began to read some of them online.  Huh?  

I never in a million years would have thought media would embrace such a silly technology.  This event must have triggered my reticular activating system because once I left the dealership it was as if the flood gates were open and everyone was “twittering” this and “twittering” that and referring to each other as “tweeple” and how they are part of the “twitter-sphere.”  

How wierd!  But also very intriguing.  

I decided since I was part of the Internet Marketing world I should probably set up an account and begin to familiarize myself with Twitter.  The more it became popular, the more interested I became.  The more I read, the more excited I became.

Although I was becoming obsessed with Twitter and excited about the possibilities, I just couldn’t get my head around it.  I did however, realize I could use Twitter to create a substantial amount of entry points to my various web projects and this was extremely attractive.

The term “knowing enough to be dangerous” was exactly where I was.  I began sending out “tweets” with links to articles I had written and noticed whenever I did … I received visitors to my blog.  It was awesome.  

I quickly built up my followers and the people I was following to several hundred people.  I had a difficult time seeing through all the noise since I could “tweet” something and within a minute or two that tweet would disappear and many other tweets would come on top of them.  It was frustrating but I knew I could figure it out.

Then it came to me……

I could get my message in front of people over and over if I just kept saying it.  That MUST be the key.  I began with this obsessive posting and watched my blog views rise every single day.  I thought I must be on to something and I was amazed there weren’t more people following this incredible formula.  

This went on for a few weeks and I didn’t think much about my strategy until I received an email from a good friend of mine, Jacob Vanderzee.

Jacob and I had a couple previous conversations regarding “breaking through the noise of Twitter.”  

We discussed how the people we’d like to get our message in front of are already following thousands of other “tweeple” and if we had a tough time staying on top of the constant flow of new messages … how would they see our stuff.

His email started by answering the question many of us STILL have today … What the heck is Twitter?!?

Twitter is a combination of Instant Messaging, Email, and blogging.  Each of these technologies has certain rules of etiquette and reasons for thier existence.  

The strange thing about Twitter is it can be used the same way as IM, Email, and blogging.  The only rule is that it must be communicated in less than 140 characters.  

Each of these mediums have had to put mechanisms in place to make sure people didn’t take advantage of the ability to get a message in front of people.  That’s how spam filters came into existence for IM, Blog comments, and Email.

These same type of mechanisms have been put in place for website search engine optimization as well.  These filters were created to stop the incessent interruptions caused by these obsessive spammers who feel if they reach enough people with their non-sense messages that some of these people will have a low enough mental capacity that they’ll actually respond.  

Man, these spammers are a real piece of work.  That’s when Jacob asked me the question that made me wake up.  He said, “look at your Twitter profile page and ask yourself this question … Would you recommend a client have their website or blog look like YOUR Twitter profile looks?”  

OMG!  I had become one of those low life spammers that we all hate!  

Well, the first part of getting better is admitting you have a problem.  I have since eliminated all my duplicate posts and my profile page now contains what I hope my followers will consider valuable, worth wile content and not just a bunch of repeated, interruption based marketing messages.

All of you who have fallen victim to my repeated spammy messages … I apologize.  I promise from this point forward I’ll only “tweet” one time and make sure it is valuable information that will make you WANT to consume it. 

Since I am now a reformed spammer who will never enter that dark world again, I promise to spend time in the coming days discussing some great ways to use Twitter without violating any spam etiquette rules.  If you’ve fallen victim to spamming on Twitter or any other medium I’d love for you to share your story.  We promise to support you on your road to recovery.  :)