We’ve got some amazing partners, and learning more about each of them inspires our team and challenges how we at Social Media Week do what we do. Bringing on Small Business Sponsor, Constant Contact, has been no different. Through affordable and easy-to-use marketing tools, Constant Contact helps create and grow customer relationships. And now, they’re here to help strengthen and grow how we support small businesses in this area. Learn a bit more about them with us, as we talk with Mark Schmulen, General Manager of Social Media at Constant Contact.
The global theme for SMW 2012 is “Empowering Change through Collaboration.” How does Constant Contact support this in all they do?
The only way to truly achieve change is through collaboration. When communities work together, they can share insights, inform, engage, enlighten and connect in more meaningful ways. Now through social media and email marketing tools, this collaboration can be accelerated. Constant Contact provides small businesses and non-profits with these tools to foster one-to-one and one-to-many conversations that result in positive change.
Constant Contact powers over 500,000 small businesses, non profits associations. With markets growing more and more niche, how do you manage to successfully target each of your clients?
Essentially, we follow the same advice we give our customers when they ask about how to successfully target clients. It really comes down to these three steps: 1. Listen, 2. Engage; and 3. Act.
Listen to what your customers are asking you, asking for, and not asking yet should be. Based on this information, engage them by continuing the dialog that’s focused on their business needs. From there, create customized messages and campaigns that are specific to them. While it’s impossible to create one-on-one tailored campaigns, you can divide your audience into segments and subgroups and create compelling offers based on the specific needs of separate audiences within your larger customer and prospect base.
For many of your clients, social media has become an integral part of their digital campaigns. How is Constant Contact integrating social media into its existing email marketing tools?
From a purely tactical standpoint, it comes down to making it easy for your customers to share your messages through different platforms. By adding share buttons such as Facebook and Twitter as well as links to your blog and website, you take out any heavy lifting a customer would have to do to tell their friends and colleagues about your business or current offers.
From a more strategic point of view, you should view social media and email marketing tools as part of your overall methods of reaching your customers. It’s not so much about separating them as it is about seeing them as complementary vehicles to reach your customers in the ways that they prefer. Email marketing is the best way to get your message heard, but social media is the best way to get that message to spread.
How does Constant Contact’s new Social Campaigns tool allow your clients to reach new audiences and ultimately drive more sales?
Our new Social Campaigns tool allows small businesses and non profits to quickly and easily run results-oriented social media marketing campaigns on Facebook. More specifically, users can create professional looking landing pages on Facebook where they can run Like-gated campaigns and offers such as coupons, weekly specials, fundraisers, product showcases, and videos for example. Yet the customer engagement is not restricted to Facebook because users can publish and promote their campaigns to their Facebook fans, Twitter followers, LinkedIn connections and email subscribers all from within the Constant Contact platform. And they can run reports to evaluate campaign metrics such as fan growth, email subscriber growth, site visits, clicks, downloads, and participant sharing.
Our primary focus is to make social media engagement even more easily accessible by allowing anybody to run their first campaign using our new social campaign tool for free. And for companies with less than 100 Facebook fans, the product is free.
Tell us a little about “Fanbruary.” How did it develop and what does Constant Contact have in store for its fans and small businesses after this campaign?
It’s not a typo! This year, we’ve re-named February and turned it into a celebration of social media success for small businesses and organizations. Every day throughout Fanbruary (even on the weekends) our team of experts will be sharing a different social media tip on our Facebook Page and on our blog.
In addition, everyone who signs up to try our new Social Campaigns tool during the month of Fanbruary will be entered to win $2,000: $1,000 their business and $1,000 their biggest fan.
“Engagement Marketing” has been a strong theme in your company strategy over the past year. Tell us a little about what this means and how it affects your offering?
To successfully build your business, it’s important to view every customer as a potential lifetime customer as opposed to a business transaction. With engagement marketing, you take this approach to the next level by connecting with your customers in more meaningful ways both offline and online. Whether it’s on Facebook, via email or another communications platform, we’re always striving to make each interaction worthy of their time and specifically address their business needs.
By engaging our customers and continuously learning how we can further help them drive business success, we are able to refine and expand our portfolio of offerings. This provides our customers with the ability to reach their customers through a comprehensive suite of of social media, email and event marketing tools.
Along with the tools, we also guide customers on how to effectively use these tools through our collective know-how and help them track their success so they truly do make the most of their marketing investments. By providing the tools and tips that enable them to learn more about their customers’ specific interest and needs, our customers are able to provide higher quality and more personalized service to their customers. Not only are they able to addresses their customers’ current needs, they have a distinct competitive advantage because they are able to anticipates future needs as well.
What sort of trends within small business marketing do you expect to see in 2012?
What we’ll continue to see is the dwindling of one-size-fits-all campaigns and the rise of more effective and highly targeted campaigns. This will happen through the continued evolution of social media, email, and event marketing tools and an increased level of comfort among small businesses using these tools.
In your opinion, what small business or organization does the most effective and inspirational job of utilizing these tools and mobilizing their supporters?
There are so many businesses and organizations effectively using social media, event and email marketing it’s difficult to point to just one. However, what I’ve found is that there are similar characteristics among businesses that are realizing success with these tools.
Those three primary traits are: 1. Passion for their business that is evident in the way they freely impart advice, 2. Receptive to feedback and continuous improvement of their products and services; and 3. Lead all of their marketing campaigns with a focus on engaging customers.
What can SMW supporters expect to see from Constant Contact this February and what should they look out for?
Look for a big, exciting Fanbruary, as we help small business and organizations get real business results with social media marketing- and don’t forget to check out our daily tips!
