Presenter: Dan Green, President of Green Internet Group 

Date: Sunday March 10, 2013

Location: The New England Food Show. The NEFS is the region’s largest event focused on the retail and foodservice markets. 

Program Description:Your website is the lifeblood of your business. It generates leads, drives conversion to customers, builds your brand, and supports your customers.

• The good news: There is an enormous amount of data available to analyze and increase your profits.
• The bad news:    There is an enormous amount of data available to analyze and increase your profits.

Data is not analysis. Learn how to approach analytics strategically, avoid common pitfalls, eliminate analysis paralysis and gain valuable insights into making your website and other marketing more profitable.

We will demonstrate how to approach this mountain of data to gain actionable insight, and use it to improve results from search engines, email and social media, prioritize marketing channels, and access brand health.

Dan is a Certified Web Analyst , a member of the Digital Analytics Association,  and a board member of  The Massachusetts Restaurant Association Educational Foundation (MRAEF)

Details and Registration Information available here, of call us at (866) 506-1923

What this means for you and your company is that it is time.

That’s right. It is time to address the beast that is Facebook.

You might be asking now, What will I get out of it?

If you are like most business owners, we tell you sadly: Not much. 

The main misconception is that Facebook is NOT the e-commerce vehicle its developers hoped for despite the infusion of capital to make it into one.  That is, most business owners are NOT successfully and consistently selling their goods and services there. 

Despite all the hype, it is simply what it began as: a site for socializing. 

Which means that if you are a small or medium-sized business owner, think again if you approach Facebook thinking “sell, sell, sell.”

If you go in thinking, “I am raising awareness and interest in the product/service I offer,” you’ll be more realistic and not set yourself up for disappointment when the sales figures are in.

The first question to ask is whether you even have a brand or service that’s right for Facebook.  That’s because your target audience may not even be using Facebook.  If your product or service is obscure—a widget maker for machines that make plastic couplings for toys for two year olds—then forget it.  Put your resources somewhere else.

But if you are not in that group, and are on Facebook already, chances are you’ve gone the route of most small or medium-sized businesses who create their Facebook “page.” They let it sit—which provides you with the dubious satisfaction of being a “Facebook member,” albeit but one without “benefits.” 

This is the real problem with Facebook: there are so many ways to do it wrong that many people simply do not want to even attempt to do it right.  So, if you’ve decided to make it part of your branding strategy, let’s do Facebook right.

“Let it be” was the anthem of the 1960s and 70s. “Do it now” is the strategy for making Facebook work for you in 2012.  

First, Facebook does not technically cost anything. Unless you spend a lot of time on it, which is of course, your primary expense.  Time equals labor costs.

Second, Facebook is a good way to appeal (not sell) to your customers and your not-yets—in fact it’s one easy and cost efficient way. The best part? You get your customers to do the MAJORITY of your marketing for YOU.

You see, it’s a fact that people trust their friends.  And on Facebook, when you get someone’s “friend” to “like” your page, then that person will be inclined to “like” your page too.  Facebook is about “liking” and “friending.” It’s that simple. Viral marketing.

But don’t take the easy way out and buy “likes” or “friends” from the many sites that offer this service—it’s expensive . . . and in the long run . . . it just doesn’t work.

Remember that coveted audience, the 18 to 34-year-olds, even if they aren’t your primary customer base (though they should be somehow).  That’s because they spend nearly 40 percent of their total hours online every week on Facebook.  And the longer they spend online, the more likely spend $$ by hitting your purchase button.  And don’t forget the older than 55 set.  They spend 21 percent of their online weekly time on Facebook.  The 45-55 year-old group is the fastest growing segment of new users.

Here’s what a business can do on Facebook:

1. Spend Time:  As you know, one doesn’t get far by not investing in this. Facebook marketing requires some of this precious resource, not a lot all at once, but a little time, consistently, in order to get true success.  You want tot build a small habit. Remember Facebook pages age more like milk than fine wine.
2. Make a Great First Impression: Choose a cover photo that expresses something about your company.  This engages your customers and potential ones to actually delve into your page.  A poor photo turns an entire page to off-putting and bland.  Don’t stick one of your store or office building; make it interesting product from your line or an image that you feel embodies the idea of your company without specifically dealing with the company itself.  Be creative, and as long as you keep true to what you want people to think about your business, sky’s the limit.
3. Post Fun:  Scrolling down newsfeeds is the primary Facebook activity. Use this!  Once someone has “liked” your page, which are simply constant beckoning calls back to your page based on time and who’s on scrolling their feeds. It takes very little time. Posting new products or new deals gets the word out and ensures you continually interact with your fan base. The problem though is that actually only between 9-30% of a business’s posts show in the feed of all their fans. However, you can increase this figure by understanding Edgerank, the site’s algorithm that modulates what content shows in one person’s feed.
4. Post Pictures/Video: This makes your posts stand out.  It’s larger and catches the eye of a user scrolling down his or her feed.  Users are 22 percent more likely to like a post that included a picture than they were to like one that included a video, and 54 percent more likely to like a post with a picture than one with plain text.  Using pictures related to your business is an easy way to increase traffic on your page.
5. Post Personal:  Posting about friends or family is an easy way to make your business more personable and to draw in more users.  An example is Johnny Cupcakes, an indie T-shirt company whose page is rated among the top pages by Inc.com.  It bursts with personality, with videos and, most importantly, publicity for a friend’s band.  Non-business interaction every so often can be a good way to connect with people on a more personal level.
6. Polls/Surveys:  A great way to make people feel like they are a part of your business: post polls and surveys about current products, new products or prospective products.  Have fans vote on products that they would like to see come out.  At the end, choose a winner and fans feel as though they have had a say in the business activity and customer loyalty goes up.
7. Events:  An easy way of publicizing a new product or a deal. When someone is invited and later something is posted on the event’s wall, then a user is given a notification.  Notifications are a powerful tool for a businesses because Facebook users are constantly monitoring their notifications.  When a user logs in, notifications are one of the first things that popup and that they will check.  Creating events are easy and by making your employees temporary administrators, they can invite their Facebook friends, bringing more people to your page and bringing more fans closer to your business
8. Look at Pages:  The best way to see what is working is to study the successes.  Look at Coca-cola, Southwest Airlines, Nike and other highly successful brands that use Facebook. Even though you likely won’t be using the flashy applications, notice the interactions and comment threads that appear around these brands.

Roughly 25% of consumers reported purchasing a product or service after discovering that product or service on Pinterest—the network that allows users to organize and share images and videos on virtual pinboards, categorized into specific themes or areas of interest. 

 But don’t rule out men just yet.  They apparently visit the site too.  In fact, 37% of males bought a product or service after seeing it on Pinterest as opposed to just 17% of females, according to a Compete’s Online Shopper Intelligence Survey.

 While the passion between Titanic box office stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet may be missing, by all accounts, the demographic at Pinterest is not:  a reported 71% of the site’s users are women between the ages of 25 and 45.

The reason, says blogger and E-commerce consultant Zoovy, is that women’s brains (unlike men’s) don’t get the single hit of the happiness-inducing dopamine when completing a task—say surfing the web or watching Titanic.  Instead, they get a continuous stream of dopamine throughout the task.

In a gender-simplified way, males are neurologically rewarded for hunting while females are neurologically rewarded for gathering.  And gathering is what Pinterest is all about: “the perfect platform for gatherers.”  Others have called it “digital crack for women.”

The other thing is that on Pinterest, there’s no way to win, which is often another fixation of the male brain. On Pinterest, you just simply just keep “pinning,” which means females are more inclined to stay active.

The highly visual site lets users save—or “pin”—recipes, coveted outfits, home décor ideas and do-it-yourself projects on virtual bulletin boards, for their own use and to share with others.

According to data from the Internet analytics firm comScore (and first reported by TechCrunch), unique monthly visitors to the site jumped from approximately one million in July to more than 11 million last month.

In just the last year, the virtual pinboarding site has seen its web traffic grow from 700,000 unique visitors to 20 million, or about half the unique visitors of the social network Twitter.  In fact, move over Facebook: 1 in 4 consumers acknowledge that they are spending less time on other social media sites in favor of Pinterest. 

Marketers and business owners take note. While nobody wants to deal with another social network, Pinterest is worth dealing with.  Here’s a quick guide to making it work for your business.

• Blog: Make posting on your blog a habit, and then “pin” the main images from the blogs (if you have one, which you should by now).  Make sure to link each image back to the related blog post, and included landing page to capture prospect lead data.
• Info-Graphics: Take company or industry information and convert into a compelling info-graphic.
• eBooks and Whitepapers: Pin the front cover on your Pinterest brand page.
• Photos: Link pinned photos back to case studies or positive user reviews you’ve received from satisfied customers. Just make sure to get permission from your customers first!
• Hashtags: These make content more search-friendly. Create a pinboard around new campaigns or product/service launch. Tag with the same hashtag you’re using on Twitter and Google+ to synch your social marketing efforts.
• Video: Pin videos. (Site homepage has a separate tab for videos.) Add business-related videos from your website or YouTube. Add links and CTAs to give prospects a simple path down the sales funnel.
• Measure: Use analytic tools through the Green Internet Group to measure traffic and lead generation performance.  This allows you to discern the successes from the failures.  Next, find patterns so you can pin the image(s) and video content most likely to generate leads and convert sales.

Your advertising budget is likely limited, like everyone else’s. 

But as the saying goes: a little can go a long way. 

A long way in generating the high quality leads your business needs.  And a long way in automating your marketing so that it’s one-step, no nonsense, focused on raising your bottom line.

Especially when it comes to sales conversions. 

It’s about knowing how to get there. 

And that’s where we come in.  At Green Internet Group, we offer easy-to-use Real Time Marketing software for businesses to generate leads through organic search and social media.

Build it and they will come.

Today’s technology?  Forget get it, mostly.  As you’ve likely heard, traditional “outbound” marketing—that is, cold-calling, print advertising, T.V. advertising, junk mail, non-solicited email and trade shows—is on the out.

In is what’s known as “inbound marketing”—social media, blogs, SEO search engine optimization—which is twice as effective and costs just a fraction.  That’s because it reverses an age-old advertising tradition. 

It’s not about finding the customers anymore.  The customer finds you.

At the Green Internet Group, we attract highly qualified customers to your business like a magnet, instead of interrupting people with various forms of outbound marketing.

Gone are the days of closing your eyes, pushing your message out, and crossing your fingers that it finds that one customer somewhere out there—the proverbial needle in the haystack. 

The problem is that your customer has changed.  He or she is inundated with over 2,000 outbound marketing interruptions per day.  And is successfully figuring out more and more creative ways to block them out. 

From caller ID to highly effective spam filtering. 

The cost of shopping—like learning about a new product, service, or solution to a problem—has dropped to nearly nothing—much lower than going to the traditional hotel seminar or flying to a trade show inLas Vegas.

That’s because everyone’s online: search engines, blogs, instant messaging, social media, emails.

One study of nearly a thousand marketing professionals finds that companies using marketing automation to generate leads experience a 61% lower cost per lead than those using the old marketing paradigm. The average cost per lead was $346.

With marketing automation, it’s $135.

Don’t run out and eliminate tradition.

It has valuable elements to use strategically.  Rather, strike the right balance for your business.  Let us at the Green Internet Group help you determine which channels actually deliver the highest ROI. 

After all, some of your targets may be more or less receptive to a certain channel.

Find out which.

The easiest way to do that—track the performance of each channel—is with a what’s called a “closed-loop marketing system.”  This tracks leads from their initial channel through when they become a customer, their first conversion. 

It allows you to easily understand which channels are driving results, and which channels are a waste of time and budget. 

Educated decisions that direct resources that achieve results.

We are proud to offer Optify as a way to manage all your inbound programs.  It’s a marketing software suite that gives you an easy way to generate more high-quality leads, enable sales and measure the impact of your programs, and all in one place.

Integrated Solution

Our integrated suite brings together SEO, social media, email marketing and powerful website intelligence into one closed-loop integrated solution.

Valuable Insight

You don’t need more data, you need insight and answers. Optify’s analytics gives marketers valuable insight into every program, and gives sales actionable data to drive sales.

Enterprise-grade

• Our platform scales for the largest and most sophisticated businesses. Flexible pricing makes it cost-effective for one site or 100 sites.
• Achieve more with less; work smarter not harder
• See what’s happening NOW with real time reports
• Use visitor intelligence to adapt to changing business microclimates
• See increases of 126% in visits, 315% in leads

free Directory submission

“41% of U.S. internet users threatened to stop buying from companies that sent irrelevant messages, according to a recent CMO Council study.”

Unless email marketers increase message relevancy, they will waste millions of dollars on email campaigns that are sure to be deleted or end up in junk folders, while losing customers forever.

So how does a business make sure messages are relevant? One of the best ways to ensure relevancy is by sending a message based on customer behavior, using event triggered messaging. Customers trigger the next message they will receive by their actions, such as subscription sign-up or renewal, event registration, purchases, shopping cart abandonment, clicking on certain content in an email, or on a website. Best of all, the process is automated, reducing labor costs and minimizing human error.

Event triggered messaging allows you to segment and automatically create personalized conversations based on demographics, purchase history, life-cycle, last open, last read and much more, instantly increasing relevancy and increasing your response rate, and new conversations may be triggered from almost any customer touch point.

In every circumstance, event triggered messaging gives you the power and flexibility to decide what messages you will send in response to a recipient initiated action. You can also decide to which customer or prospect you will send that particular message or series of messages. You are not just sending emails; you’re beginning a conversation that’s relevant and automated.

Automated event triggered messages can help you close more sales, nurture leads effectively, increase customer satisfaction and improve retention.

Messages can be triggered by a single event, or throughout a series of events, with the recipient determining which message he or she receives by the action taken at each step along the way, effectively creating a conversation that is relevant to the customer’s needs at each step.

Here are just some of the types of trigger events that can start a conversation:

• Fills out a website forms
• Abandons form
• Abandons shopping cart
• Buys a particular product
• Product returns
• Subscribes to a list
• Registers for an event, such as a conference or seminar
• Clicks on a particular link in email message
• Updates profile
• Downloads a whitepaper (lead nurturing)
• Email delivery of educational course material
• Website Registration

Using event triggered messaging to automate your customer conversations not only improves your email campaign performance and customer relationships, it is also saves time and money spent on manual processing and involved programming. Improved performance and lower costs-now that’s a welcome message in today’s economic climate.

Email marketing is one of the most effective return channels, outperforming most other marketing methods. But it’s time to up your game or risk losing customers for good. To do that you need a better strategy; you also need a more sophisticated email solution to get the results.

Ready to learn more? Call 866.506.1923  for more information or submit a request online.

Wednesday, June 13, 2012
Colonnade Hotel, 120 Huntington Avenue, Boston 
Sessions & Workshops – 8:15am-4:00pm
Networking Social – 4:00-7:00pm 
Register online or call (508) 303-9905 

Do you need to re-evaluate your marketing and branding strategy?  Do you get overwhelmed by all of the mobile, social, and local search tools available to you?   Let our panel of experts enlighten you at the industry professional education event of the year! This day-long symposium of marketing seminars has been planned specifically for restaurant and hospitality venues and is designed to help you better brand your business, navigate the current digital landscape and easily utilize the newest technologies for targeted marketing and promotional campaigns.   

With presentations, workshops and table-top exhibitors lead by a power line-up of marketing and technology experts, you’ll walk away with the tools to bring your restaurant’s visibility to the next level - with an effective branding strategy and a greater presence in our increasingly mobile and digital world!   

In addition to seminars and exhibitions, we hope you’ll stay for our post-event mixer,  where you will be able to connect with marketing and industry pros while enjoying hors d’ouevres and a cash bar at the chic Colonnade Hotel. Don’t wait to register for this must-attend marketing “crash course” and industry event! 

Sessions

Session 1: Five Pillars of Effective Branding 
9:30-10:15am
w/ Jim Fisher of Triumph Revenue Advisors, Ed Doyle of Real Food Consulting
Caitlin Simmons of Boloco and AJ Gerritson of 451 Marketing 
Panelists will cover the key branding elements and present case studies of various restaurants that have succeeded in effective brand positioning and selling.  

Quick Fire Marketing Challenge 
10:30am-12:00pm
w/ AJ Gerritson of 451 Marketing 
A fun and interactive workshop where you will become a marketing consultant for various restaurant concepts and develop a brand based upon a unique restaurant scenario.

Session 2: Navigating the Current Digital Landscape 
1:00-2:00pm
w/ Dan Green of Green Internet Group 
An in-depth look at how the web, search marketing, social media, email and mobile have evolved and how you can profitably navigate the digital marketing landscape while consistently focusing on the the tools that produce the greatest return on investment. 

Session 3: Using Emerging Technologies for Targeted Marketing 
and Promotional Campaigns 
2:15-3:15pm
w/ Francis Skipper, 451 Marketing
A discussion about how the finding and sharing of information about restaurants has changed dramatically, and how the presence of mobile apps, location-based services and local search have taken center stage as smartphones and tablets increasingly dominate the mobile landscape.  We’ll take a look at some new tools, their implementation, best practices and analytics that can make marketing and promotional campaigns more targeted and user-friendly.  

Keynote Presentation: 

\

The Payment Revolution is Coming: 
Welcome to Interchange Zero 
3:15-4:00pm 
Seth Priebatsch
Chief Ninja
LevelUP & SCVNGR

Join Seth Priebatsch for a fast-paced session on how a combination of mobile payment start-ups, the Durbin Amendment and a tipping point in consumer behavior will completely change the way we think about money, force credit card interchange rates to zero and re-wire how our economy works. 

Networking and Cocktail Mixer 
4:00-7:00pm

Join us for a fun social where you will be able to connect with other marketing and industry pros while enjoying drinks and hors d’ouevres in one of Back Bay’s finest venues, the Colonnade Hotel.  

Exhibitor Opportunities: 
Interested in exhibiting to this targeted audience of restaurateurs and hospitality industry professionals? If your company offers marketing or technology products and services, take advantage of this great exhibitor opportunity.  Limited space is available for Table-Top Exhibitors on a first-come, first-serve basis.  For information, contact Lon Breedlove at LBreedlove@massrestaurantassoc.org or call (508) 303- 9905.  

Cost: 
$139.00 (MRA Members) $199  (Non-Members) 
Fee includes materials, lunch and networking mixer admission
Register online or call (508) 303 -9905 

Follow @Massrestaurants and use #MRASymposium to learn about event updates!  

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