Do You Need a Facebook Fan Page?

Cultivating a Facebook Fan following is a unique and powerful form of permission marketing, whereby your target audience have consented to your constant contact.

• They’re yours to share your message with time and again.
• They already like you.
• They already stick around for the long haul.
• They already care about what you have to say about your business.

But the profitable impact of Facebook goes much further than just a medium to contact customers.

What’s better than you being able to share your message every day to your target audience?  Having them share your message for you, to every single one of their friends on Facebook!

When your customers take 1 second out of their busy schedule to hit "like‟ on your Fan page, a small easy step... it is a HUGE public commitment that they’re a fan of and recommend your business! They are publicly declaring themselves a fan of your business, a very powerful message to both themselves and their peers.  It literally shows up as clear and direct as “Sally Buyer likes YOUR BUSINESS”.

Now consider that if your average customer has even 50 friends on Facebook, 10 "Likes‟ = 500 brand exposures for your business, with a cost of $0... Can you think of another way to get your customers to recommend your business to pretty much everyone they know, with 1 click, for free? A few of their friends will also hit „like‟ and so the profit virus spreads, without you having to do a thing.

Needless to say, these numbers are conservative given the dramatic adoption of Facebook among basically the entire developed world. Most of your customers will probably have over 100 friends... now that’s the kind of math we like! Of course as a business owner, you’re more than likely aware that “word of mouth” is the strongest form of marketing around. You’ve worked hard to make sure your customers have a great experience, but how many of them are really spreading the word? I bet it could be more. Don’t let that goodwill go to waste, let your customers share it on your Fan page!

With some clever marketing that relies on some basic principles of human behavior, you can build a following you can bank on in no time.

Here are some things you can do with a Facebook Fan Page:

• Give your customers an incentive to like your page, i.e. a discount that reveals itself when they click that magic "Like‟ button.
• Stay at the top of their mind so when they want something they think of your business.
• Sell directly to your fan base with special sales.
• Showcase new items.
• Get rid of slow moving stock or fill your venue during off peak periods.
• Run competitions that encourage your customers to spread the word about business.
• Collect people’s email and mail addresses from your fan page to execute direct mail or email campaigns.
• See who your customers are. Take the time to browse through a few of your customer’s profiles. Notice their age, their likes and interests, where they live, what engages them.

You’ll be getting access to market research that would have cost a small fortune not too long ago. The possibility of your business message going viral, your name spreading like wildfire and your customers raving are well worth pursuing when you think of the impact this can have on your bottom line.

Create A Facebook Fan Page

PHANTOM POWER
Marketing by Design
http://www.phantompower.co/

Customer Data Is The New Black

Few assets are more valuable than a company's customer base. Yet most companies are more systematic about managing their office supplies than their customers.

According to a recent study conducted by eConsultancy, 98% of marketers use at least three channels to deliver messages to their customers, but more than half still store the data they gather from each channel in separate, siloed locations. In the same study, only 35% of marketers report that they collect data from different sources and store it in a single database. And when asked about the challenges of multichannel marketing, 71% cited maintaining high-quality data as a major challenge.

A company's customer base should be managed like an investment portfolio. Like good investment advisers, Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service all share responsibility for maximizing the performance of that portfolio. And that requires a single source of reliable customer data that fuels the operations of each department.

That's why it's so important to manage information about every customer interaction in a shared business system that all customer-facing employees can access and use to communicate with and serve the customer. The customer can then be treated appropriately and consistently because Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service are all aware of her needs, interests, previous purchases, and value.

Such a single view of the customer not only makes it easier for employees to make smarter marketing decisions and interact with customers more effectively but also creates a better experience for the consumer.

Integrating cross-channel data in a single database creates an invaluable corporate asset and accelerates the ability to interact more effectively with customers in real time.

Customer Growth Requires Data

The primary job of Sales and Marketing is to attract and grow customers. Doing that successfully requires using customer data to support customer engagement strategy, interactive marketing technology, and sales and marketing operations.

In B2B marketing, for example, customer growth occurs via account penetration. That means identifying and connecting with more and more individual buyers within the account. In this context, think of the account as a network of multiple sites, composed of multiple buying groups and specific people with responsibility for specific applications—applications for which your products or services meet the customer needs.

Marketing to those very people who make or influence purchasing decisions is mandatory. But businesses tend to assign differing sets of responsibilities to people with roles that look identical from a functional-title perspective alone. As a result, reaching the right people inside an account is difficult, complex, and expensive. Relying on relationships within buyer groups is necessary for identifying other buyer groups and generating referrals.

That complex set of relationships can be visualized as a cube, with account plans being driven from decoding and mapping the relationship network.

Serving Has Become The New Selling

If account penetration is about achieving customer growth by selling your products to more buyers within an account, product penetration achieves growth by selling more products to each buying group. Product penetration is about more than short-term revenue enhancement. It is about creating sustainable customer relationships that are based on delivering value by serving the customer better.

To truly serve customers better, companies must learn to market to a "segment of one," because today's customer wants more control over the content that is being delivered via email, mobile, social media, and website channels.

No longer is it appropriate or acceptable to guess what information or offers the customer wants. In fact, it is destructive to the customer relationship. The recent Subscribers, Fans, & Followers research conducted by ExactTarget found that 90% of consumers unsubscribe, unfan, or unfollow when the communication received from brands is too frequent or the content is irrelevant.

When companies "unsilo" their old single-channel marketing strategies, commit to understanding individual customer needs and interests, manage that insight in a single database, and use it to deliver timely and relevant content, they don't merely sell more: They also create a community of brand advocates who become some of the company's most effective marketers.

PHANTOM POWER
Marketing by Design
http://www.phantompower.co/