Painted Lemur Studios has a wide variety of clients, representing a diverse cross-section of business types. On the surface they look very different - different sectors, different types of customers, different product and services offerings - in both B2B and B2C. Some can easily articulate their customer’s profiles, while others have a hard time describing their typical customers due to the complexity of their offerings. What they have in common is their marketing problem - they are struggling to effectively reach their partners, customers, and prospects in today’s social marketing environment.
It used to be that the traditional marketing plan called for casting a large net to catch a group of leads through broadcast advertising. This worked very well for many years, and proved to be a great way to do things. Yet in the past few years the yield is going down, almost becoming anemic in some cases.
In an effort to become social, someone in a company takes the lead and decides “we need to tweet,” or “we should be on Facebook.” Typically they are viewing social from either personal experiences, or as an extension to traditional broadcast marketing. Their results are typically disappointing, as their messages get lost in the noise of social media, and are not supported by the company in general.
Being a Social Business means incorporating social marketing best practices in all aspects of the business, in a coherent and consistent fashion. For example, Social Marketing compliments traditional marketing functions by introducing the notion of personal relationships and conversations to the marketing functions, and provides a consistent message for everyone within the company to use in their day-to-day interactions. Social Sales extends those conversations and relationships via conversions to actionable leads and opportunities for the company. It is about making the customer feel connected to your brand, being able to reach out to you when and how they desire, and making them feel like you are there for them so they want to do business with you.
Tweeting by itself accomplishes little.
Tweeting in alignment with a Social Marketing calendar, targeting key groups, and leading individuals down a conversion path to capturing them as a lead or an order, and being retweeted by everyone within your organization to dramatically increase the reach of your message is what the use of Twitter by a Social Business is all about. Social Business allows the organization to work together more cohesively, coherently, and efficiently, generating better and faster results.
It isn’t whether or not you should become a Social Business. From this point forward, to be successful, it is about how well you can do Social Business.