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 It doesn’t take a ton of money to market your small business. All it takes is determination, combined with a little strategy. In this, the first of a multipart series, I’ll walk you through basic, low-cost marketing techniques that any small business can use to boost their marketing to the next level. On the agenda today: Become an online expert. By showcasing your expertise, you’ll gain customers’ and prospects’ trust. They’ll see you as a credible authority on topics related to your products and services. And with repeated exposure to your brand, they’ll become loyal customers. The first step to becoming an expert is to research blogs, forums, email discussion lists, social media sites and other user-generated content relevant to your company. Start getting involved in these conversations. Offer insightful tips and advice that  solves problems and answers questions. You can carry these conversations into your email campaigns, too. Simply create e-newsletters with content that answers burning questions. For instance, if you own a bakery, you could write about the differences between baking soda and baking powder. Not only does this approach provide a valuable service to users, but it also casts you as the resident expert on the topic. With time and persistence, you’ll generate plenty of new and repeat business.

In my last post, I gave you three tips for generating leads with social search. Now it’s time to think about measuring the return on social marketing. There’s no question that social media has value. In a May 2011 online poll conducted by social marketing platform company Roost, more than 71 percent of the local businesses polled said that social marketing is their most effective channel, compared with just 15 percent who ranked paid search as their tool of choice. What’s the draw? With few barriers to entry, low start-up costs and the ability to stay top-of-mind with customers, social media makes bottom-line good sense. Yet even though these businesses are on board with social media, 45 percent of them reported that they’re unclear how to measure their social marketing efforts. And while metrics remain one of the key challenges of social marketing, it’s not impossible to calculate them. Let’s consider a fictitious example of a marketing promotion where you offer 30 percent off regular-priced items for one weekend only, both online and in your store. You write about the promotion on your blog and Facebook page, Tweet it out and post a YouTube video related to the promotion. To measure results, you can look at:  How many bloggers wrote about the promotion The number of comments, likes and shares on the posts Pre- and post-promotion traffic and sales on your site The number of retweets and how often your hashtag was used The number of times your vanity URL was used The number of new followers and fans Page views for your video In short, use the very mediums that are promoting your sale to measure your promotion’s effectiveness. While not all of these measurements come down to dollars and cents, they do give you an idea of how your campaigns are faring. They also will help to guide your future social marketing efforts. Got a great idea on how to measure social marketing returns? Share it with us.

It’s a new era in social media — one where it’s not enough simply to create a Facebook page for your business and hope to attract fans. Welcome to the age of social search — and, for your small business, social marketing. Consider that Google’s Social Search helps users find relevant content from their social connections — say, a movie review from your best friend — while Bing has now heavily integrated its search technology with Facebook. With major search engines staking their claim in social search in order to generate the most relevant results, it’s critical that small businesses actively pursue social marketing efforts to boost their rankings. The following three tips will help you improve your social search results and, ideally, boost your bottom line. Optimize your site for “likes.” Facebook has boosted the visibility of users’ “likes” by adding thumbnails and meta data from its Open Graph Protocol, meaning that getting a page “liked” on your Website will improve your visibility in newsfeeds. Make sure you have a like button incorporated throughout your site — Facebook has a button tool that will let you create and customize the button for your site — and test different headlines and meta tags to see which ones drive traffic. Sound too technical? Work with your webmaster to hammer out the details. Create great content. Keep in mind, your customers have to actually like something in the first place in order to feel compelled to click the “like” button. Offer timely, useful tips and commentary that incorporates keywords, intriguing headlines, and visual elements such as bold and bullet lists that draw readers into an article. If you lack the skills to generate this type of content on your own, hire a copywriter. Deliver on your likes. It’s not enough for customers to find you through social search, nor is it enough for them to click through to your Website. They need a reason to stick around and buy. Work with your webmaster to make your navigation easy and intuitive, with strong calls to action incorporated throughout your site to entice prospects to make purchases. Include a readily visible email sign-up form, so users will join your list and help you build a contact database. Even if you’re new to social search, or new to social media in general, you can build a strong social search presence. Just start slowly with a few well-executed “like” campaigns — and, with time and persistency, your efforts will reward you.