Engaging Your Target Audience Requires Finding the Right Voice for Your Brand

As a sales and marketing professional with over 20 years experience (35 product launches including 3 iPhone apps and one social networking/video streaming community) I am energized to see the big push to engage with the customer by brands. No longer is the conversation one-sided. Well, that’s true for some and not so true for others, but the intent is there.

When I started doing sales / marketing in my early 20’s I read a lot of books, took lots of courses and then applied them to practical experiences – i.e. my job, emerging technologies and so on. I have always focused on the WIIFM process as a key “best” practice, of course, there are many acronyms that people use for many different methodologies, but what it comes down to as a consumer (B2B or B2C) – “What’s in it for ME?”

Today’s marketer has seen a rise in the effectiveness of using Web 2.0 Tools by up to 52% as shown in this graphic from a recent McKinsey Survey.

Then there are the objectives that marketers are seeking to gain from using Social Marketing / Web 2.0 Tools:

The biggest issue that I am seeing with the push to include Social Marketing / Web 2.0 is that brands are launching the use of these tools without building it into an overall plan. This is not just getting a Facebook page or a Twitter account or having a blogger review your product. There is no cookie cutter process – it’s finding the right voice for your brand and resonating that voice with your target audience to have an engaging conversation. “What’s in it for me???”

If you haven’t already registered and want to get some practical information on how to optimize finding your audience and engaging with them please register now and come join me tomorrow for my workshop. You’ll get some great insight into building your marketing program to take advantage of Mobile, Social Marketing, Video and more. (My version of Web 3.0…)

The Right Web 3.0 Marketing Mix Workshop w/Case Studies on Why You Need to Cover Your Bases

Brand engagement is in a big state of change right now, with the push to add SEO, social media, video and mobile to your outbound marketing; understanding how to get a ROI and what the right mix is can be challenging.

You’re invited to attend: The Right Web 3.0 Marketing Mix Workshop w/Case Studies on Why You Need to Cover Your Bases Workshop

Thursday, January 28th 2010 at 9 AM PST / Noon ET

We created this workshop to answer the most common questions that our clients are asking and give you practical “use cases” to help you determine what will work best for your brand.

During this 3 hour workshop will be examining each of the key elements you need to consider as you engage with Web 3.0 marketing tools and determine what the right mix should be for you to launch a brand, new product or expand your current reach. We will do this by taking several examples from different client case studies and discuss the importance of Video, SEO, Social Networking and community (yes, Twitter is part of it), and mobile as part of your marketing strategy and talk about how we helped each of these organizations from start to the end result.

We will also go through a recent case study for an online, LIVE streaming community was developed and created by Key Practices. This “social TV portal” broadcasts 90 weekly streaming video web chat shows and has a social networking community; and has grown to be one of the highest trafficked sites for the mom market in less than 6 months. We will also talk about several ways to use new media and social media in the right time and place to build buzz and brand engagement.

The key takeaways from this workshop will be how-to get your baseline set for understanding where your brand is online as well as how to hone in and engage with your target audience. We will cover the basics of SEO, Social Media, Mobile, Video and how it is important to tie these tools all together with your overall marketing plan.

We will also leave an hour open at the end to answer any questions submitted during the registration process as well as answer questions at the end of the session from what we covered during the workshop.

Several Case Studies Will Be Reviewed: Industry cases studies include: software, retail, business services and social networking.

Register Today: Thursday, January 28th 2010 at 9 AM PST / Noon ET

The cost of of this workshop is $74.95 and all workshop attendees will receive copies of all materials shared as well as a discount on any future services needed from Key Practices.

Do you have your bases covered for 2010 growth?

Usually we don’t take on new clients without doing a full “background” check on them. No, not the kind you’re thinking of, it’s our sanity check really. Like a doctor, it’s hard to prescribe a remedy without understanding what’s going on in your system.

We start out by running a series of reports from your website performance and optimization to who your competition is (top 5) in search. From there we do our “who’s your customer” analysis. There’s nothing worse than not understanding who your customer is and how they search for your services. Once we complete that we can start with the comparative analysis on strengths and weaknesses (SWOT Analysis, the strategic planning method used to evaluate Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats).

Brand engagement is in a big state of change right now, with the push to add social media and mobile to your marketing, understanding how to get your ROI and what the right mix is can be challenging.

If you’re a brand that has an agency that manages this for you, it’s time to look at them and see if they have really gotten it figured out. So often we see a disconnect on how to blend the right mix together it might take several campaigns to get it right and then again, how will you know?

There are over 300K social media “experts” on Twitter right now. Just because you have blogging, twitter and Facebook figured out – does not mean you know how to mix them together with traditional marketing, video, mobile, advertising – off and online and optimize search.

Want to get your 2010 marketing strategy bases covered? Even if it is just a sanity check to see what the options are for your brand? Engage with a full-service marketing group like Key Practices. Sometimes it’s as easy as changing one word on how you are marketing yourself to be found by those seeking your services.

Connect with us for our 2010 SWOT: Traditional Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Video and Web 3.0 analysis report.