And one of the nine things every marketing leader should do to get the most from social media according to Forrester’s playbook of predictions for 2015 so read on…

First And Goal

Sunday’s Super Bowl XLIX, featuring the Patriots’ wild, down-to-the-wire 28-24 win over the Seahawks, scored a 49.7 household rating and a 72 share — besting the 48.1 rating set two years ago when Baltimore triumphed over San Francisco. The final viewer tally for that game was 108 million.

Last year’s Super Bowl of course stands as the most-watched U.S. television event of all-time, having averaged 112.2 million viewers.

The Patriots, who just happen to be my favorite team, became the sixth team with at least four Super Bowl wins. They are tied with the Pittsburgh Steelers and Dallas Cowboys for most Super Bowl appearances, with eight. Pretty impressive statistics.

If you imagine the Super Bowl as a website with people from all over the world clicking through to engaged a piece of quality content, online event or special offer it then becomes essential to find ways to keep them wanting to return.

One thing I am sure of is that the accomplishments of these teams and this event were achieved through hard work, experimentation and by constantly moving forward to find the right mixture of plays, players, coaches and marketing strategies to consistently drive their success.

Scoring Points With Your Audience

This is what you need to accomplish in marketing your website. Do you think that the Super Bowl or any major event would be as successful if they didn’t use every play in their playbook to engage their audience?

You need to give people a reason to want to visit and keep coming back to you website whether they are a lead (perspective customer) or an existing customer.

When events like this occur the social channels light up with a frenzy of activity including commenting, sharing and newsjacking which I am guilty of here but it is a common and can often be a beneficial tactic.

According to Hubspot, the article I linked to here, I am a little late to the party but I don’t do this full time so I guess I can be forgiven. But if it helps to get my point across, an important one- I think, and one that works and has been gaining traction plus a subject that I have been writing about for years.

Calling The Right Plays

If you have been following my articles you might have a good idea what my point is but if not it is creating an Onsite Social or branded community depending what the trending term may be and there are others.

In fact this strategy has been included in Forrester’s playbook of predictions for 2015 as one if the nine things every marketing leader should do to get the most from social media.

Nate Elliott’s favorite prediction , Nate Elliott is a quarterback of Marketing Leadership Professionals, and my favorite from the report is that as social media matures, branded communities will make a comeback. According to Nate, “It makes sense: Marketing leaders report they’re significantly less satisfied with Facebook and Twitter marketing than with branded forums. But nearly twice as many marketers run Twitter and Facebook accounts as host to their own communities.”

It’s time for marketers to focus their efforts on the social tactics that actually work, can play well over the long term and contribute to all your team strategies- meaning brand-hosted forums within communities can help you all the way across the customer life cycle:

• “They can drive greater brand reach. Many brands try to garner word of mouth by posting content on Facebook and hoping it goes viral. But this “post and pray” method rarely works. The right way to create word of mouth? Advocate communities. Invite a few hundred of your most satisfied customers into an exclusive forum, issue them word-of-mouth challenges, rank them on a leaderboard, and watch your reach multiply. It worked for B2B vendor Bomgar.”
• ” They can convert prospects into customers. When people are researching and considering their product options, they usually end up visiting your brand site. You already know that adding ratings and reviews to your site can drive more sales — and so can a branded community. Adding a Q&A feature or a forum to your site will both convert more prospects and lead to more satisfied customers. It worked for the Milwaukee School of Engineering.”
• ” They can cement existing customer relationships. Some marketers turn to Facebook and Twitter to engage existing customers. But US online adults who want to stay in touch with your brand are three times more likely to visit your site than to engage you on Facebook. Both B2B and B2C marketers have found branded communities create more loyalty and lifetime value than Facebook and Twitter marketing. It worked for semiconductor maker Analog Devices.”

“Onsite Communities are HERE, they are REAL, AVAILABLE and currently providing enormous BENEFITS to businesses across the Industry horizontal.”

Scoring Touchdowns through Great Customer Relationship Management

Get out in front and open up opportunities! Great Customer Relationship Management equals delighted customers, loyal customers, attracts influencers, fosters word of mouth advertising, testimonials and provides brand reach that together can turn your site into a virtual ecosystem of engagement that will drive traffic to your site and broadcast your message across the digital spectrum unlike any other form of paid, organic or earned media can offer. See Press Release

Social Community Playbook Strategies Include:

In addition to establishing a forum including an Onsite Social Community will anchor your customer centric culture by offering a permanent and centralized platform for communicating and engaging with your present and future customers and keep them coming back.

Benefits (permanent and specials/offers) and much more can be offered to existing and to sign up potential customers to gain important information to create buyer personas that can all be managed from one central location-Your website (Your owned real estate)

1. Discounts on purchases

2. Discounts on Warranties

3. Discounts on Maintenance Contracts

4. Discounts on Services

5. Discounts on financing

This includes permanent discounts for community members as well as special discounts offered on a timely basis. Put your marketing dollars where they will offer the highest ROI by directly benefiting your members the ones who are going to pay you back over and over through loyalty.

6.An Onsite Customer Care Center

With direct access to Customer Care representatives with knowledge and authority to answer questions, solve issues and make appointments

7.Drawings (To keep them coming back)

Have a monthly drawing for $$$ In free services and or product discounts that broadly cover individuals current needs that members can enter every month with their e-mail to keep members engaged and visiting your site.

8. Contests

There are countless ways to engage your audience by sponsoring contests within your onsite community and across your social channels and are only limited to your creative ideas.

9. Special Offers

Have special offers for community members and site visitors (who join) for doing something that will extend your brand.

10. Onsite community Testimonial Page

Take a picture of winners of contests, customers satisfied with service or at time of purchases that you, your employyes and customers can automatically and easily post to the Community Testimonial Page (See PhotoRep) and their Social Media channels.

11. Social casting for on and offline events in “real time”

Events anchor any business to their community. You can take advantage of and encourage your community members to participate in all your real-time event ‘live’ media marketing to help you broadcast it across every online digital and traditional marketing channel.

Imagine blog casting, social casting, and mobile applications all working together to engage and draw potential viewers and fans to the event both during and after it’s over.

Events marketing can also be used as a multichannel online sales or advertising event tool to enhance your inbound leads and including community members can add invaluable authenticity to all your campaigns.

I have listed 11 Plays here to put in your playbook of marketing strategies utilizing your onsite community and there are many more that you can add to keep driving down the field to keep scoring goals.

Onsite Communities are HERE, they are REAL, AVAILABLE and currently providing enormous BENEFITS to businesses across the Industry horizontal. Businesses are driving leads through Inbound and Digital Marketing strategies utilizing their onsite communities to broadcast their customer centric culture across their social channels and organically across the internet.

The upside potential of having and utilizing an onsite community to engage and interact with your audience and customers is enormous. Showing your existing and potential customers that you will be there before and after the sale to reward and take care of them will create a customer centric culture that will foster customer loyalty that will extend across all your earned, owned and social media to benefit you and your customers each and every day. This is customer care at its finest and what will drive your success for years to come.

Give me a call to show you how we can get you across the finish line time and time again.

William Cosgrove

Way Back When

The use of the hashtag, from my research, appeared in 1988 when early internet users began including them in messages. They were used to group messages, images and videos into categories.

Fast forward 19 years and hashtags reappeared on Twitter when Nate Ritter experimented using the the hashtag #sandiegofire. Some credit Chris Messina, a social technology expert, with the very first hashtag that appeared on Twitter in 2007.

Regardless of who’s on first, what’s on second and I don’t know who’s on third hashtags have since become one of the most widely used tools on the internet with many popular social networks such as Facebook, Google+, Instagram and others adapting hashtags as way to let users more easily communicate.

Use Real Time Hashtag Apps For Community Events, Contests, Sales & Marketing Campaigns and To Have Social Media Conversations.

Get Creative

Hashtags are one of the most useful and versatile features on many social media platforms and bring in audiences interested in your brand that can help spread information about related products and services. Hashtags can be brand and campaign specific, used with posted content and to follow what is trending. Hashtags are used to regularly hold chats to keep targeted audiences informed and for companies to get actual feedback.

Get creative and add to your social media fan base and onsite community. If you take the time to design hashtags that fit your business you can engage your fans with a variety of incentives, contests, events and other thought inspired ways to keep them coming back, sharing and commenting.

Another creative way to utilize hastags is to incorporate a hashtag page onto your website. Check out One Big Broadcast’s Social Post and Hashtag app as an option that gives you the ability to harness any number of hashtags in real time as they are posted at Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. These can meld with your community on your own web site to stimulate your followers to view, create and share their content and the share results automatically via social networks to attract visibility to build your community.

Harness yours and other people’s hashtags from social channels like Facebook, Twitter and Instagram to stimulate users and visitors to create content and interact with your brand to build interest excitement and community.

Tracking Hashtags

Hashtags can be tracked and analyzed to provide great insights on how people are interacting with your brand, business, product, service, event or blog and give you insight into conversations going on within social networks.

Keyhole is a one of many sites where you can get real-time tracking and historical data for hashtags from Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Or for some other tools that can help you launch, track and analyze hashtags across social networks, see this article posted by Social Media Examiner “5 Hashtag Tracking Tools for Twitter, Facebook and Beyond”

Attracting more leads and increasing sales is the bottom line and hashtags are a cost effective tool to add to your toolbox. Make up your own hashtags. Promote your own brand. Display these feeds on your own screens - even stadium or conference screens during events to get everyone in on the action.

This infographic by Quicksprout will give you some more helpful advice on the benefits of hashtags and different ways in which to use them.

Businesses that integrate content marketing, social media and SEO strategy are seeing big results. Integrating these marketing channels can be a challenge and marketing from Ground Zero provides a very cost effective way of pulling all these channels together to provide impressive long term and sustainable results.

For any business looking for better ROI along with small and medium sized businesses with limited digital marketing resources it is important to cut through the noise and find ways to provide your business with the most economically viable and sustainable ways to build your brand, provide great customer service and drive new business.

Most businesses have an online presence with exposure to social media to some extent but in many cases do not feel they have the resources, to take their online marketing to the next level. If this describes your present situation read on because marketing from ground zero can be the answer.

Brands Building Community Should Promote Own Sites

Today, as reported by by Gavin O'Malley at Media Post “At least as community-building tools, marketers should forget about Facebook and Twitter. That’s the crux of a new report from Forrester Research, which suggests that the social giants are losing their grip on what has historically been known as “social” marketing.

“Top brands Facebook and Twitter posts reach only about 2% of their fans and followers, and less than 0.1% of fans and followers interact with each post,” Forrester analyst Nate Elliott explains in the new report. “Marketers need to rebuild their social relationship strategies around sites that work.”

In place of Facebook and Twitter, Elliott and his colleagues suggest that brands build out their own social-friendly properties. Indeed, U.S. online adults are nearly three times more likely to visit a brand’s Web site than to engage them on Facebook.”

More than 80% of small businesses cite that (Ground Zero) - their website is the number one way they engage with customers. This statistic alone shows that businesses should be looking for ways to more fully utilize this precious resource.

Great Customer Service Is Key to Free Publicity

There is no better way to provide excellent customer service than through an onsite community. More than two-thirds of American consumers said they're willing to spend 14 percent more on average with a company that delivers excellent service, according to new survey from American Express.

Providing great customer service can also get you free publicity through recommendations and referrals. Forty-six percent of respondents said they always tell others when they've had good service interactions, and 42 percent said that a recommendation from a friend or family member is more likely to get them to do business with a new company.

The Power of Customer Loyalty

New customers driven by existing customers’ recommendations are the second-biggest source of revenue—more than new customers who come to a business from other sources.

Repeat customers were by far the biggest source of revenue for more than 43 percent of entrepreneurs, while new customers accounted for about 19 percent of revenues.

Whatever the trending term these onsite customer care and benefit centers (communities) can benefit companies across the industry horizontal. There is no better way to create measure and maintain customer loyalty and drive referrals and recommendations than by having an onsite social community.

An onsite social community offers benefits that no other medium can match and is the most economical way to maintain and grow a loyal customer base. One Big Broadcast has been a leader in developing and customizing these types of platforms for years.

A Proven Platform

One Big Broadcast has been at the technological forefront of Onsite Social Communities for years and has been redefining the customer experience and how businesses and their employees interact with both their existing and potential customers by taking customer care, service and benefits to a whole new level. Onsite Social Communities shifts customer support and service to being part of the brand marketing mix.

One Big Broadcast’s SEO automation and CMS technology combined with our inclusive suite of marketing products and fully integrated mobile capability provides a low cost way to create an ecosystem within itself that can power your online and mobile marketing initiatives to cost effectively cut through the noise to market smarter.

• Social: Although growing a following takes time, social media posts appear instantly and results can happen within minutes.
   

• Search: SEO is typically slow and uncertain. Even highly relevant pages take days to get indexed and rank. It often takes years to build up enough credibility to compete for the most valuable phrases.
   

• Social: There is virtually no limit to the number of people who may share a piece of content. If you’ve ever been part of a mini viral event, you know just how far and how fast things can spread.
   
• Search: The amount of traffic a page will get from a search engine will never exceed a certain number. That’s the number of people who search for that phrase each day. The search volume for the phrase is the maximum amount of traffic the page will get from search engines.
   

• Social: Content that stirs an emotional response often does best, especially emotions such as anxiety, anger, and awe. See Brain Science and Web Design Tips for more information.
   

• Search: Research-based content often performs best, such as detailed, how-to instructional posts, and articles that answer common questions.
   

• Social: Visuals perform best in social media. Images and video are the most shared content on the web. Posts with images generate 53% more likes than average on Facebook.
   
• Search: Long form text performs best. The average page that ranks high in Google has 1500+ words. See the Ideal Length Guidelines for more information.
   

• Social: Visitors from social media marketing are typically less likely to buy since they were likely browsing through a social network when they found you. But they are more likely to share and spread awareness. Social fans and followers often influence potential buyers.
   
• Search: Visitors from search are more likely to be ready to buy, but less likely to share and interact. These visitors enter with a specific purpose, need, or question.
   

• Social: Marketing with social media involves many short-lived actions. Most visibility and traffic happens within minutes. This is why social media requires a continuous, ongoing effort.
   
• Search: Once it’s working, search traffic can lead to durable visibility, creating an ongoing, passive source of visitors. Depending on the phrase and the page, high rankings may endure for weeks or months.
   

• Social: It’s easy to measure social engagement. Shares, likes, and comments are all highly visible. But it’s hard to measure reach. The total visibility and traffic of all social activity is not easy to report on. There are many platforms and each has its own reports. Social traffic reports in Analytics are not very accurate.
   
• Search: It’s easy to measure the reach in search engines. The total visibility and traffic from search is centralized in a just few reports, showing keyphrase, impressions, and clicks. But, it’s harder to measure engagement. Keyword data at the page level is no longer provided. It’s difficult to know which keyphrase led to which activity on the website.
   

• Social: High ranking content brings search traffic that can drive follows, comments, and shares. Social media profiles often rank high. Google Authorship puts social right into search results.
   
• Search: Smart SEOs know that ranking and links are the outcome of relationships. Blogger relations, PR, and many other search tactics are actually social activities. Skills such as list building, outreach, and pitching are critical to SEO.