I am reviewing Yelp, a service called Blue Corona, and Twitter.
Yelp.
Yelp is a website that has become significant for influencing online comments for a particular business or to share information on an experience. It is one of the most popular social networking sites and features user generated content, that is based on your personal experience.
I frequently use this website to make many of my daily decisions. For example, where to eat, where to stay, what to visit, who to use. Its become part of my decision making process. I rely on the comments from others to help make my decisions. So Yelp has a tremendous amount of influence in generating revenue for a business. If the reviews are favorable ( from other users ) then I will usually go with their recommendations. This online networking site is influencing customer behavior and thus something I need to consider for my company.
One uses Yelp by signing up, and creating a personal account. You create a profile and once signed up you are now part of the Yelp community and post reviews.
The major benefit that I can take away from using Yelp for my companies business is to have positive word of mouth reviews recommending Durable Casters for your caster needs. We don't have any reviews now on this site but I think it may help us.
The negative aspect would be if a customer had a bad experience and posted this. Could have adverse affects to our reputation and business. So it is important that you fulfill the clients experience in a positive manner. Many businesses currently suffer from people posting bad reviews. This can hurt you. Yelp uses a star type of review system. With 1 star a bad experience up to 5 stars which is excellent. It would be very important that your team, especially, the customer service team realize that they need to provide quality service. As mentioned, a negative review based on a bad review could convince others that are online and reading this information to avoid buying our casters.
My competition: I looked up several caster companies that I compete with and although several are listed on yelp none had any reviews. Not sure why but buying casters more often then not is a one time purchase. The products tend to last forever with some exceptions so this is not like say a restaurant or retail operation. Products are primarily sold wholesale. I may be able to take advantage of this fact if we decide to sign up.
From research on Yelp I found that 92% of Yelp visitors make a purchase after visiting this social network. 42% will make the purchase the same day they read your reviews. So this site has some major influence on your business.
The keys are the following: For Durable Casters to receive good, consistent reviews: Sign us as a company with our profile, provide excellent customer service ( both on the phone and proper email etiquette) earn good ratings from customers, this is very important, respond quickly to a negative review, and with ratings that increase with more stars enjoy more sales growth. After all we are a profit oriented company and the bottom line is to increase revenues.
Blue Corona
I found this Social Media Marketing Service by browsing the internet.
Blue Corona offers a number of service to help you market your company on the internet. What I found interesting was the Social Marketing program. They emphasize: Tracking, Test, Tweak, and Repeat. So they focus on a strategy that uses data to help achieve your sales goals.
Blue Corona will conduct a competitors analysis and check out why we may be losing out on customers. What is the competition offering that has increased their audience size. This would be very helpful. Next, help us Post and scheduling regular posts that monitor interaction and find out if customers our engaging with us.
Next, create data driven customized target campaign to help grow our brand.
Track our social campaigns which at this point are very limited.
Mange our social reputation and feedback and finally integrate these efforts through a social website like Facebook.
I think Blue Corona is hitting each aspect that would be important to Durable Casters. I liked all of their proposals and although their is a cost it may well be worth it.
Twitter
I decided to look at Twitter because its always on the news with the President tweeting and I really don't understand it. Why should I care about Twitter and can it help my business? It was my understanding that this is a strictly social network ( I was wrong again ) but after reading up on this site it does have an entire business element that may be useful. There are over 275 million active users so I think this is something we need to get involved with. If there are that many users then there must be something of value to this. I found that much like the other marketing sites you need a profile and a create a Twitter handle. Twitter recommends something short and easy to remember. Easy enough.
Twitter states that they are the number #1 platform for discovery. And that 53% of the people on Twitter are more likely to be the first to buy new products. So they have a very large following. And if the data is accurate this results in purchases.
By doing some research online I have found the that 80% of all Twitter users mention a brand in a tweet. Currently, Durable does not use Twitter but if this true then perhaps I need to sign us up. That is good exposure and excellent word of mouth advertising. Much more effective then our traditional way of mailing out catalogs and brochures. The caster business is not exactly cutting edge.
The main goal as I understand it is to create a Twitter Marketing Strategy - Well ours would be simple. Promote the Durable Brand. We want new customers which equals more sales.
So Twitter much like Blue Corona and others helps you identify the competition, next audit your account ( review and critique the performance of your Tweets. Are we posting the right content, is the posting consistent. Next, see if you can quantify a return on your investment. ROI is important and necessary if we are going to devote our limited resources to this program.
Twitter also places emphasis on leads and are the leads turning into sales. After all that is the reason we would sign up and dedicate resources to tweeting.
Finally, this is not a one time shot in the dark. To use Twitter effectively this process has to be given sufficient time to work. So we would need to stick to a strategy for at least a year and repeat our tweets to achieve our sales goals.
In conclusion, Twitter looks like it would be good for reaching new customers and this is another effective, marketing tool for increasing our sales. I am going to recommend we sign up for this.
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