Hashtags and Social Media Marketing Power

As an online business or even a small to medium-sized business, social media marketing is a serious way to market your business. Now, while most business owners know this [or at least have an idea], it is still likely that they don't know just how much social media marketing can grow their business, helping them surpass their competitors. This is equally true of online businesses and small to medium sized businesses.

For those of you who are familiar with social media, I'm sure you know about hastags - you know, the # symbol that everyone puts in front of a word or phrase they want/need to stand out. While this hashtag frenzy can be a bit over the top with everyone over using hashtags, they are imperative for social media marketing.

The article below is about the use of hastags and how they can "pack serious media marketing power":

Q: I’m operating my fledgling company without a budget for advertising and marketing. Can I use social media hashtags to drive sales and build my business? If so, can you offer tips so I get the best results for my efforts? 

A: For the uninitiated, hashtags—the # sign before phrases in social media—have changed how small businesses connect with customers. First used by Twitter in 2007, hashtags have been adopted by Pinterest, Instagram and other platforms. The symbol packs serious power. 

Search #SparkandHustle (that’s my company) on these sites, and you’ll see what people are saying about my conferences for entrepreneurs. I’ve connected via hashtags with thousands of people to promote my business. Joining the ongoing conversation is an effective way to target audiences, serve them better and compete with rivals. In doing so, you should focus on two areas: 

1. Incorporating hashtags in your social media posts to attract new fans and followers.2. Searching hashtags to find people interested in what you have to offer. 

Here are some ways to achieve objective No. 1. First, whenever you share content, include a relevant hashtag so your post can be found when your target audience searches for related help. 

You should also piggyback on hashtags that are popular and tweet them, suggests Lena West of Influence Expansion Academy, an online business growth school. “If you work with small businesses, the #SMB hashtag is often used in tweets related to small-business concerns. If you use it, those tweets will come up on searches for that hashtag, leading to more visibility for your company.” 

And you should create your own custom hashtag to enable anyone interested in your area of expertise to join the conversation, says Dana Lynch, whose Amplify-Mobile develops apps for small businesses. “Use it across platforms—a hashtag is useful only if followers know about it—so promote it everywhere users can find your brand,” she says.

If you're a small to medium sized business that has yet to implement a successful social media marketing campaign, it's due time. Social media marketing is a way for you to build relationships with your current or prospective clients and grow your business -- faster than many of your competitors. Today there are many companies that you can hire -- and for a reasonable price -- to manage your social media marketing campaigns, like Classic Image. 

These companies will handle the day-to-day marketing needs of your campaigns while you can focus on what matters most... growing your business.

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Innovative Ways To Market Your Start-Up Business (and Successfully) Through Social Media Marketing

Over the last ten years technology has advanced quite a bit, including the way that social media is used. First generation social media platforms like Myspace were basically used by people to connect with other like-minded individuals. It was used to share your life and everything about you, including your up and coming band, short films, etc. Today, however, social media is so much more than that -- especially for small to medium sized businesses and start-up businesses around the globe. In all essence, social media is something that can help you make your brand go viral.

As a start-up business it is very important to understand just how important social media is when it comes to marketing your business and the growth of your company. The article below talks about three different ways that start-ups are driving results through social media:

1. Warby Parker  

Social strategy: Encouraging user-generated content that drives brand awareness. 

Warby Parker, a New York City-based online seller of vintage-inspired eyeglasses and sunglasses, is using social media to reinvent how people shop for and purchase eyewear. It does this by shipping customers five pairs of frames that they select from Warby Parker's website in packaging that encourages them to take pictures of themselves wearing the glasses and then post the shots on their Facebook, Instagram and Twitter accounts. Customers can take five full days to test the glasses before shipping them back and, the company hopes, placing an order.
The strategy behind the Home Try-On campaign is for shoppers to get feedback from their social-media friends and contacts on which pair fits them best, while generating a positive, social buzz around Warby Parker's brand "in a natural, organic way," says co-founder and co-CEO David Gilboa. Customers who post photos of themselves in frames are buying at twice the rate as those who don't, he says. 

Shoppers seeking opinions outside of their own social-media circles can submit pictures to Warby Parker's Facebook page for additional feedback. Home Try-On participants have posted some 25,000 images on the company's Facebook Timeline and more than 40,000 on Instagram since the promotion was started in February 2010.  

"Don't view social media as just another way to push your marketing messaging," Gilboa advises. "Think of Facebook, Instagram and Twitter as critical customer service gateways and take the time to respond to each and every customer who reaches out to you there. Each comment, photo and tweet gives you an opening to directly communicate with them on a meaningful, personalized basis that encourages brand loyalty."




The founders of Pork Barrel BBQ created their own social-media platform for BBQ fanatics.  

2. Pork Barrel BBQ   

Social strategy: Creating its own social community.  

Who needs Facebook when you can invent your own social-media network specifically tailored to your target demographic? That's what Heath Hall and Brett Thompson did in February 2011, creating Backyard BBQ, a social-media network for barbeque enthusiasts.
The co-founders of Pork Barrel BBQ, an Alexandria, Va.-based barbeque sauce, restaurant and catering company, noticed that barbeque fans from around the world were interacting on internet message boards and forums that didn't allow them to share, comment on or like photos and videos. In response, the company developed a free online social space for grillers of all skill levels, from backyard beginners to competitive pit masters, so they can swap recipes, cook-off stories and pictures and videos from the pit.  

Hall and Thompson invited legendary pit masters, such as Johnny Trigg, Pat Burke, Rod Gray and Melissa Cookston, to join the social network and help spread the word in their own social networks and grilling circles. Backyard BBQ has grown to 4,312 members from in the U.S. and in more than 20 different countries, Hall says, and it is driving "a significant amount of traffic" to the company's main website where people can buy sauces and rubs.  

From concept to launch, it took about six months for Hall and his Pork Barrel BBQ co-founder Brett Thompson to develop BBQ Backyard. They developed the platform using Ning, an online service that lets individuals and businesses quickly, relatively easily design, create and host their own custom social networks. Ning offers a 14-day free trial and basic monthly prices range between $25 and $99. Hall says it cost about $500 in all to get BBQ Backyard off the ground.  

Pork Barrel BBQ has its own member profile on Backyard BBQ, of course, featuring blog posts, how-to cooking videos, recipes and promotional event photos. Hall encourages fellow small-business owners to launch their own specialized social networks "if there is a void in their particular market." Hall says the benefits "can be enormous in terms of networking, spreading your brand message, learning about new opportunities and giving back to the community."

You can read the rest of the article here.

If you're a start-up business that is looking to grow your company there are a various ways that the use of social media can make that happen. Classic Image is a creatively driven marketing and design company that thrives on helping businesses grow; a company that has helped hundreds of start-up businesses with their marketing and social media campaign, providing excellent results for a reasonable price. The company is insanely creative, coming up with innovative ways to grow your business, regardless of your niche. Give them a ring! 

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Content Marketing: How to Grow Your Business With Content

Content is King...it's Just the Way It Is

As a small to medium sized business you might have heard the phrase "content is king" somewhere along the line. It might seem crazy, but the truth of the matter is that content IS king and content marketing is something that small to medium sized businesses will need to take advantage of at some point or another, especially if they are looking to grow their business. 

We have worked with hundreds of clients who have been working on building their business for years only to find that their marketing campaigns have lacked a few major key factors that are simply imperative if you're looking for profit, growth and wealth. 

As a small to medium sized business it is very important that you include these factors within your marketing campaign: 

1. Strong Brand (one that will stand out from your competitors) 
2. Marketing Campaign that includes Social Media Marketing and SEO
3. Content Marketing

With these three key factors incorporated into your marketing campaign you will see that the growth you're seeking will hit home. You might want to consider looking for a company to help you with your marketing needs so that they can focus on marketing your business while you can focus on what matters most -- growing your business.

Content marketing is extremely important and it isn't something that just anyone can succeed in. It takes time and skill, and yes, a little bit of strategy. In a recent article (below), Joe Pulizzi talks about the top ten content marketing strategies from the last 15 years: 

1. There is no silver bullet
Regardless of what anyone says, there is no silver bullet when it comes to content marketing strategy. So many marketers are looking for the perfect dashboard, system, process, and distribution plan for their content marketing. It simply doesn’t exist. We’ve worked with hundreds of small and large brands around the world, and only one thing has been consistent: Every plan we developed was different. Why? It’s simple: The mixture of communicating what your business offers, delivering on your customers’ informational needs, and sharing your own corporate story is impossible to duplicate —  the output from your particular blend of attributes and goals should always be different and unique. 

As Don Schultz, the father of integrated marketing, has always professed, competitors can copy everything about what you do… your pricing, your product, where you promote it… but they can’t copy exactly how you will communicate. 

2. You can play offense or defense 

One of my favorite basketball players of all time is Julius “Dr. J” Erving. I’ve heard many interviews in which Dr. J talks about two ways to look at basketball offense: You can impose your will on the defense, or you can take what the defense gives you. Dr. J always chose to exert his own will, and that worked for him (quite well, in fact). LeBron James, on the other hand, usually takes what the defense gives him, which is why he racks up so many assists.
Both strategies can be effective. At CMI, we decided to exert our will with the term “content marketing.” In 2007, we popped onto the scene and started using the term like it had been around for years. Through lots of planning, strategy, and luck, it worked, and now content marketing is the defacto term for our industry. (Incidentally, HubSpot did the same thing with “inbound marketing.”) 

But imposing your will is just one way to do it. You could also choose to ride the waves of others and pick your sweet spot. A great example of this is Social Media Examiner. When it launched in 2009, many thought it was late to the party… but it rode the social media wave and executed a content marketing strategy second to none, growing into one of the most-trafficked B2B marketing sites on the planet. 

3. Content marketing is the great equalizer 

“David vs. Goliath” is alive and well in content marketing. Large budgets don’t always win; actually, the smaller players usually come out on top because they are equipped to move more agilely and quickly than their larger competition. For instance, CMI had a smaller budget than almost every marketing media company on the planet, yet we came out on top through focus and hard work. I’ve never seen a bigger company move faster than a smaller organization. OpenView Venture Partners is, relatively speaking, a small VC company compared to its peers. On the web, though, it dominates. 

4. You don’t have to be on all platforms 

In many cases, it’s smart to weave your story onto multiple platforms. It’s entirely possible to have a killer webinar series, amazing blog, outstanding video program, and cutting-edge digital magazine all at the same time.
But there is another way. You may decide to focus and work to dominate one platform. How about a killer podcast series? What about an amazing print newsletter? Maybe a blog is just the platform for you. 

Yes, you construct your strategy before choosing your channels, but don’t feel obligated to be active on every channel that your customer uses. The international travel magazine, Monocle, has just a print magazine. No iPad version. No Facebook page. It works for the magazine and its readers. 

Sometimes simple and focused is better. 

5. Subscribers rule 

If I have one regret as a content marketer, it’s that I didn’t focus early enough on generating subscribers. It took us years of experimenting, but we finally found our “Moneyball number:” the subscriber. We’ve found that once someone is a subscriber, they do different things than non-subscribers that lead to more revenue for us. Instead of converting from content to an immediate sales opportunity, we’ve found that converting from content to more content is the best way (for us). (For more on subscribers, please check out these outstanding reports from ExactTarget — a great example of content marketing, as well.)

You can read the rest of the article here.

If you or your business is in need of content marketing or general marketing assistance, Classic Image is a premier marketing and design agency that has helped hundreds of companies over the last decade. They are affordable, too, so you don't have to spend an arm and a leg while you're trying to bring your business to the top.

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Great Innovative Marketing Campaigns of 2013 (So Far)

Photo Courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Regardless of whether you and your business are working on an inbound or outbound marketing campaign, what makes a marketing campaign effective is an emotional connection - an emotional connection with your readers, your audience, your customers and your potential customers. It used to be that the only way to make that emotional connection was through outbound marketing techniques such as cold calling, door to door marketing or direct mailings. Today, thanks to the growth of technology, there are a million different opportunities for a business to truly achieve that emotional connection and obtain long-term customers, making an affinity between your customers, the messages and your product or service.

Because there are so many ways to reach your customers in this complex digital world, marketing professionals have a million and one different ways to promote their business, their services and their products.

The article below talks about five of the most innovative marketing campaigns of 2013 -- so far. These marketing campaigns have made their mark and that is only the beginning:

1) Coca-Cola Sharing Can
Coca-Cola has really hit it out of the park recently with their campaigns. They have done an incredible job at connecting with their audience through understanding their motivations and the nostalgic feelings behind craving a can of Coke. Another impressive aspect of recent campaigns is the attention that Coke puts into making each message global. Coke has smartly positioned themselves as a brand that connects millions of people across the world.
Recently, Coke has upped their game with how they get people to not only emotionally engage with their brand, but also with each other. They created a vending machine that enabled people in India and Pakistan to communicate. And in Europe Coke is offering customers a chance to customize their own Coke bottles with their names. The most recent iteration is the idea of having a can of Coke that twists apart into two smaller cans so you can share! I immediately resonated with this. I love Coca-Cola, but I often can’t finish a full can, so having two small cans that I can share with a loved one is genius. Currently, the cans are only available in limited quantities during a trial through their “Happiness Truck”. So that is a bummer, but I have high hopes the concept will make it to the mainstream.

2) Senador Volstead Beer
This is a truly innovative campaign. Senador Volstead is a beer company based in Spain named after Senator Volstead, who decreed the start of prohibition in 1920. So how do you promote a beer that is themed after 1920s prohibition? Why not make it hidden on your own website? I have never seen anything like this, which immediately makes it memorable.When you go onto the Senador Volstead website you might be confused at first because it appears to be a website selling teddy bears. 

3) Game of Thrones Season 3
OK, truth be told, I love Game of Thrones. I also love HBO and I think their marketing is genius. I mean, True Blood? That first campaign truly set a precedent. But what I am really into right now is Game of Thrones, and their marketing campaign for Season 3 was clean, consistent, mysterious, and of course cool.
The big theme for the season premiere this year was a subtle, yet mysterious shadow of a dragon. The beauty behind this campaign was that it was extremely consistent and its subtlety did a lot to build momentum to the premiere. First came the poster and magazine covers:

 4) ORPHEA Billboard Fly Trap
This example appeals to emotions in a different way. Instead of focusing on the warm and fuzzy feelings of nostalgia or excitement over looking forward to something in the future, ORPHEA relies on the relatable pain point of bug hating to bring their customers together. And they used an extremely unique marketing technique to get their message across.

They rented a billboard in Milan and created a giant insect trap using transparent glue that was placed on the billboard in the shape of an aerosol spray. Over time, insects naturally got trapped in the glue and created a huge, and very visible insect trap. Gross? Maybe. Shocking? Probably. Memorable? Definitely! It certainly attracted millions of people’s attention. The lesson here is never be afraid to try something different.

You can read the rest of the article here.

 For B2B businesses or small to medium sized businesses who would like some tips on successful marketing and social media marketing tactics, please contact us at Classic Image today to see how we can help your business with all of your marketing campaigns from social media marketing to direct marketing. We strongly believe that combining inbound and outbound marketing tactics is a great way to help any business flourish

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The Best Advertising Campaigns of All Time

An advertising or marketing campaign is something that stands out and a good advertising campaign should be something that will stick with you, something you will remember. Slogan's are also something that people tend to remember, such as Nike's Just Do It campaign or Got Milk? so they are just as important as a solid marketing or advertising campaign. 

Any business - including small to medium sized businesses - should make sure that they have a solid advertising or marketing campaign that will make them stand out. A campaign that will still with potential customers or current customers for years to come, solidifying your place within the marketplace. In order to do this properly you will need the expertise of a company who's main focus and goal is to help a business like yours ride to the top through marketing or advertising efforts, just to ensure your efforts are effective and your hard earned money isn't wasted. 

The infographic below shows the best campaigns of all time. These are campaigns that probably everyone remembers, which means they are also effective campaigns. 

Are there any advertising campaigns that you remember that are not included on this infographic? 

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Revamping Your Brand

Revamping Your Brand is Imperative for Continual Business Growth

While it might seem like a lot of work, all businesses large and small should consider revamping their brand, depending on the following factors:

• Age. How many years has your company had the same look and feel? How long have you had the same logo design where things are measured in weeks and days today? It's imperative for continual business growth to keep your brand fresh...
• Introduction of a New Product or Service. If your company is about to roll out a new project, property or product it might be a good idea to update your brand or logo, keeping your business fresh. 
• A merger. If there is a change in leadership within your company then you might want to consider making a change. 

If your company is experiencing any of the above you might want to assess your business and where it stands as a brand. Even with that said, however, it's important that you don't just change for change's sake or because you're tired of your brand. You shouldn't make a change until you fully understand just how much it's going to cost, both dollar-wise and emotionally. A change in your brand isn't just another marketing campaign, it's more than that so you want to ensure that you choose the best company to help you with all of your branding needs---at an affordable and reasonable price. 

There are major companies that have recently decided to revamp their brand, such as Apple. Google, Inc and Android based devices are rising to the forefront so Apple has decided to boost their brand, offer more features and other enticing product offerings. 

According to this video, released in June 2013, Apple is looking to revamp their brand and stand out from the new Operating System rave Windows 8. 

In addition to the new operating system, Apple has decided to revamp their advertising campaign -- a wise choice, in my opinion. 

What are your thoughts on Apple's revamp? A good or bad idea? 

If you would like help with revamping your business' brand, contact us today to discuss your needs and the world of possibilities that a brand revamp will bring to your company. 

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Video Marketing: A Few Video Marketing Ideas That Stand Out

Interesting Video Marketing Campaigns of Summer 2013

Video marketing is becoming increasingly important in today's day and age. Social media marketing and video marketing often go hand in hand, and with the right techniques they could really help a small to medium sized business grow and flourish -- faster than businesses who do not utilize social media or video marketing tactics. Today it is possible for a small to medium sized business to take advantage of video marketing and for an affordable price. 

Throughout this blog I have included a few very interesting video marketing campaigns that have recently shown some success -- or who have at least brought awareness to a company's products or services. 

Samsung's New Ad Campaign

Buddy the Dog has somehow managed to get the attention of customers worldwide. What do you think of this video campaign? Do you think it's effective? 

What about this other ad campaign below? 

For businesses that would like to take advantage of what video marketing or advertising has to offer there are a wide variety of companies out there that will fully manage your video marketing campaigns as well as search engine optimization and tactics. I've worked with quite a few and I've found that my business has grown quite a bit by combining video marketing and social media with traditional marketing tactics like direct mailings and so on. 

If you or your business is in need of some marketing assistance, Classic Image is a premier marketing and design agency that has helped hundreds of companies over the last decade. They are affordable, too, so you don't have to spend an arm and a leg while you're trying to bring your business to the top. 

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Cost-Effective Social Media Marketing Strategies for the Small to Medium Sized Business

Ten Ways to Develop Cost-Effective Social Media Strategies

Photo Courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Many small to medium sized business owners find themselves too busy to develop solid social media marketing strategies that will do what they are supposed to...grow their business. Instead, business owners are working in their business, 50 to 60 hours or more per week, not having any time to focus on what matters most. Social media marketing is a way that business owners can expand their reach, but there are certain strategies that business owners should follow to make their campaign as successful as it should be. 

Social media marketing allows you to grow relationships with your potential customers and current consumer-base. If you don't have the time  to focus on social media efforts alone, you might want to consider utilizing a company that is known for growing businesses and their social media efforts. 

The article below discusses ten ways that you can develop your social media strategy to ensure that it provides you with the results you need:

• Does your business lend itself to showing off its work? Strutting your stuff brings to mind visual portrayals, like photographs and video, although it can include other presentation formats. Social media is very useful for businesses where prospects perceive there are high risks. Many bridal photographers use blogs to highlight their work while many bakers use Flickr to show off their masterpieces. Show real patrons using your services with before and after photographs. Don’t forget to get patron’s permission to use their likeness.

• Can you give prospects information they find useful? Think in terms of small bite-size chunks of content. Twitter is great for providing a tip of the day whether you’re an accountant or a massage therapist. Clothing stores could provide an outfit of the day. Think outside of the box when it comes to information. How about food recipes or scrap-booking.

• How do you solve people’s problems? At the core of most marketing is fulfilling prospects’ needs. Therefore, create content that helps people with their problems. For example, if you’re a financial advisor, why not give out tips on budgeting so that prospects have money to invest. Here’s some advice to create a professional blog.

• Does your product lend itself to some form of education? This is a great way to win prospects over. Teach them! Not the old-fashioned school marm but the fun stuff. Think: how to add memory to your computer or how to apply makeup. You can use videos, webinars or ebooks.

• Can your business disseminate entertaining content? This information doesn’t need to be your business’s main focus. Orabrush built its brand with the use of entertaining videos. Is there something funny or engaging about your product?

• Are there targeted or niche communities where your prospects and customers naturally congregate? While this doesn’t apply to all businesses, where it exists, it’s a useful way to participate in the community. You can participate in the social media community and advertise to targeted prospects. For example, yarn shops participate and socialize on Ravelry, a knitting community.

• Does your business tap into people’s passions and/or hobbies?When it comes hobbies and special interests, participants often make different spending tradeoffs. The strength of these interests is great since your customers want to share their share their hobbies and special interests using photographs, videos and blogs. This can apply to fishing as well as it can to quilting.

You can read the rest of the article here.

For B2B businesses or small to medium sized businesses who would like some tips on successful marketing and social media marketing tactics, please contact us at Classic Image today to see how we can help your business with all of your marketing campaigns from social media marketing to direct marketing. We strongly believe that combining inbound and outbound marketing tactics is a great way to help any business flourish.

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B2B Marketing Selling Strategies

B2B marketing is one of the best ways to help your business
flourish.
Photo Courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

While economic times are still a bit tighter than we would all like to admit, it’s important for business owners to try their best not to skimp on promotion—especially with b2b marketing or marketing to other businesses. A lot of business owners will simply put up a website and run an occasional ad in an industry trade journal. Sure, this advertisement might bring in some new customers and help in some respects, however, successful B2B marketing needs to provide a steady stream of consistent messages across a wide variety of platforms.

Putting up a well thought out and designed website is a start for reaching other business owners who are also potential customers, but it’s also important that you do not think of your website as a “once and done” type of thing. B2B marketing and social media tactics are extremely important for you to work on because you will receive much better results—results that can make a world of difference in your business.

The article snippet below is from a recent article posted on Business News Daily, about how B2B businesses can market their business—successfully—from day one.

Be engaging

Just having an online presence isn't enough, though. Your B2B customers are still consumers and they need to detect coherence in your overall marketing strategy.
"Start with an Internet strategy that maps your overall business strategy." Rigano said. "How much do you want to grow, what markets will be most important to your growth, and what will constitute success in each of these markets? 

Set up your website to support your achieving these goals, with content that makes your company easy to find online, and helps convert prospects into buyers. Hold your website accountable for sales, and use analytics to continually measure results and refine your strategies. 

Email and social media also are essential and fit into almost any budget, but they require effort and monitoring. 

"I'd suggest tools like e-mail and social networking because not only do they come at little to no cost, but they are often user-friendly and allow you the ability to get very, very targeted who receives your message, when they receive it, how they receive it and why," said Jeremiah Sullivan, co-owner and operator of Woodbridge, N.J.-based Framework Media Strategies, a marketing and public relations firm. "Even better, these tools also allow for consistent and immediate communication between you and the business you've reached out to and also records a written history of everything shared." 

Tracking results

Whatever approach a business owner takes, tracking the results and making adjustments is the key to success. 

"The United States Postal Service's intelligent mail bar code tracking, which makes it possible to receive notifications that let you know when a direct mail piece will reach a recipient," said David Henkel, president of Niles, Ill.-based Johnson & Quin, a provider of integrated marketing services. "An email can then be sent or a call can be made to a prospect informing them that their mail piece is about to come."

It is also important to consider the types of businesses you are trying to reach when determining whether email, direct mail, banner ads or other vehicles are the best way to reach customers.

 You can read the rest of the article here.

For B2B businesses or small to medium sized businesses who would like some tips on successful marketing and social media marketing tactics, please contact us at Classic Image today to see how we can help your business with all of your marketing campaigns from social media marketing to direct marketing. We strongly believe that combining inbound and outbound marketing tactics is a great way to help any business flourish.

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Social Media Marketing Tips That Will Help Grow Your Business

In today’s technological world it is almost unmanageable for a small to medium sized business to flourish without utilizing social media marketing. Marketing tactics change regularly, so keeping up the rest of the world is essential. With that said, regardless of what kind of business you run, it is very important to continuously look at other avenues that will grow your business.

Social media marketing or SMM is imperative
for the success of small to medium sized
businesses.
Photo Courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net.

Now, while there are a million different methods that you can utilize it’s also equally important that you find ways that will not require you to spend hours upon hours working in your business, rather than on your business. Social media marketing can do just that, if managed properly and efficiently. Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and other platforms are increasingly becoming a well-known—and successful—marketing tool. These platforms can assist your business in obtaining a healthy and growing fan base that will generate leads, word-of-mouth and conversions.

At Classic Image we have managed hundreds of social media marketing campaigns over the last five years. We understand that the concept of a small to medium sized business handling their own social media marketing campaign can be overwhelming, but there are many tips that you can consider utilizing to make your life easier—and to help your business grow. The last thing you want to do is spend hundreds of hours on social media efforts only to find out that your approach will not bring in the results that you desire.

Throughout this blog I’m going to mention a handful of tips that you can use to help strengthen your social media efforts and growing your business:

Get More Leads with a Call To Action. There is no question about it—a social media call to action is an integral and often overlooked element of a social media strategy. Social media gets prospects, customers and the public primed to want to find out more about what your business is offering or to engage with you further. You can use any platform to achieve this, too, such as a blog, Facebook, Twitter or a landing page. If you strengthen your call to action you will receive a better success rate, compared to ones without them.

Optimizing Your Business’ Facebook Posts. Many people don’t even think about adding a call to action to their Facebook page. However, sometimes just the act of inviting someone to share your post will be the encouragement a fan or follower needs to take your suggestions. And this works with any niche. For instance, you can post a link to your blog or another piece of useful information (something that you are offering) and ask your fan base to SHARE the information with their followers or colleagues. It can really be as simple as that. Take the image below, for example. 

 Experimentation. As you continue with your social media efforts it’s always a good idea to experiment with different call-to-action’s. Take Twitter, for example—it’s a fast moving stream of content and because of that updates can quickly flow by readers. While they are deciding on whether to read your full update, a call to action can practically seize the moment. AND if that reader likes what you have to offer they will be more inclined to follow you, retweet your message and visit your page.

Content is KING. So give it the significance it deserves.  Many small to medium sized businesses do not take into account just how imperative content is when it comes to all of their marketing campaigns—but especially social media marketing. Fresh, frequent and quality content is necessary to bring in new clients and customers. In the same respect, though, even the BEST content in the world won’t do a lick of good if people are not engaged. Make all of your content engagement-friendly.

There are many more tricks to the trade when it comes to social media marketing and how to utilize it to truly benefit your small to medium sized business, but the best bet is to test…test…and test again. You will need to test your results and see what works for your individual business because what might work for your competitor might not do any good for your business.

If you are someone who is interested in learning more about how Classic Image can help benefit your business, we are here to discuss your needs seven days a week. We are home to some of the top marketing professionals in the business, but at the same time we are a group of creative professionals that use all tactics to help push businesses to the top.

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B2B Marketing & Social Media

In today’s world, technology and social media is ever-changing. In fact, 2013 is marked as a year that will bring B2B marketing and B2B social media marketing to the top. One main reason for this is because daily social media usage includes B2B customers and prospective customers. Many B2B companies and small to medium sized businesses complain that their customers and prospects do not use social media, but according to a recent report 40% of the world uses a social media website every day.

According to the infographic below, created by Saxum, people are using social media each and every day. So as a B2B business, once you begin to identify where your customers and prospects are in regards to social networks, the next step will be to determine what kind of useful content you need to create to connect with them.

 The statistics below show just how important it is for B2B companies and for small to medium sized businesses to use B2B social media marketing:

•  1 out of every 7 minutes spent online is spent on Facebook. 
• 23% of Facebook users check their newsfeed more than 5 times per day. 
• 2.1 billion search queries are conducted on Twitter every day. That’s almost half as many as performed on Google. 
• 1,370 company pages are added to LinkedIn every day. 
• Facebook and Twitter traffic peaks in the afternoon. 
• LinkedIn traffic peaks in the morning. 
• 200 million hours of video are watched on YouTube every day. 
• 10 million presentations have been uploaded to Slideshare. 

There are a wide variety of tactics that businesses can use that will really boost their social media presence. Once this happens you will find that your business will begin to cultivate and flourish. While no one can expect this to happen overnight, you will notice a difference within one to two months of continuous effort.

The infographic below reveals “Social Media in a Day” for B2B social media marketing and small to medium sized businesses.

Classic Image is a creative marketing firm based in Brooklyn, New York, dedicated to helping businesses just like yours move to the top. They have worked with hundreds of small to medium sized businesses in the Brooklyn area--and nationwide--with social media campaigns, content management and all marketing essentials. 

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