Tracking progress with online marketing is easier with these tools.

After finding online marketing opportunities, like we said yesterday, you’ll need to track your “wins.” This can be a confusing and daunting thing to do, too…unless you know the tools that can track your leads for you.

Google Analytics helps yet again! It tracks referrals from the company’s social media profiles. And twinfluence and Twitalyzer are Twitter-specific tools that measure how influential and
far-reaching the company’s Twitter presence is.

Klout tracks the impact of your posted content and links, including which audiences are exposed to the content and how they interact with it.

Translate the information about results and figure out the positive financial impact on your
business. Key performance indicators can come in various forms, like new revenue generated, a good amount of time and money saved, or a good financial return on investment.

Armed with this information, hopefully it will become clear how much social media marketing is helping your business…or how much more you need to work at it in order to make a positive financial impact on your business! If you want to find out what needs work in your business quickly, take our Business Health Check.

As with traditional marketing, it’s all about opportunities. When you find opportunities to sell your products and services, you don’t shy away, do you? You take advantage! The same with online marketing – find opportunities to get the word out about what you’re promoting. However, with online marketing, it can be trickier. Where do you find these opportunities? And with social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, sure, you might have 500+ followers/friends, but do they really care about what you’re promoting?

If you’re lost in terms of online marketing, you need to be able to first find opportunities which you can expand upon in terms of marketing. Don’t know how to start? The following tools will at least give you a good idea of what’s being said about your company or industry online, and where users spend their time:

• Google Alerts (http://www.google.com/alerts) emails you whenever a chosen
keyword (e.g., company or product name, CEO name, campaign tagline,
industry term, etc.) is mentioned in any form of online content.
• Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com/) scans the blogosphere
for any keyword or phrase you type in.
• Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com/) scans all Twitter posts for your
selected keyword or phrase.
• SiteVolume (http://www.sitevolume.com/) reports how often keywords or
phrases appear on Twitter, Digg, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr.
• SocialMention (http://www.socialmention.com/) enables you to search
keywords and phrases by specific channel category (blogs, images, news,
video, etc.), or as a whole, and to receive email alerts when a new mention
is posted.
• Socialcast (http://www.socialcast.com/) offers real-time analytics on microblogging
and other social activities and identifies individual users’ level of
activity. Unlike most tools, it also can quantify the value of “lurkers” who
aren’t visibly posting comments, but by how often they frequent a site.

Take note of what’s being said about your company or whatever keywords you search, whether it’s positive, negative or neutral; what people
are passing along to friends; and if there are any particular needs or customer
segments that aren’t served. These are all opportunities for marketing…

As if you didn’t know that already. Heck, it’s been changing. But just so you know, it will continue to change.

According to an article in the Marketing Watchdog Journal, with social media marketing picking up the pace, marketing and PR will converge, measuring and ROI will increase in importance, and CEOs are paying more attention to what’s being said about their brand to ensure their marketing efforts and customer service efforts are both promoting the company.

Read the full article here, and see what changes you might need to make at your own company’s marketing department.

Even though the “hot” sites today for networking and business marketing are LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, there are a few niche sites out there that might serve you well.

People can be blinded by the “big three” named above because the goal of marketing is getting your message in front of as many people as possible. However, it’s more important to get your message in front of as many people as possible who are interested in what you’re selling. That tactic will get you closer to a sale.

From niche European business networking sites to websites linking small business owners and entrepreneurs, Sitepointe.com gathered 20 smaller networking sites that specifically benefit business owners and entrepreneurs. Check them out and see who could become potential clients and who could benefit from a business coach.

Hopefully you get it by now: social media is the way to go, and it’s here to stay…for a while, at least, as a marketing tool for businesses.

Are you caught up on social media sites? Do you utilize each site you joined to its fullest potential, so you can get the most marketing usage out of that site?

Look at our checklist and hopefully, you’re already doing the following to benefit marketing your business on social media sites:

Networking: What good are your 789 friends if you don’t talk to them? Just like in real life, networking is key. The more people you know, the better; everyone you network with starts off as a lead or someone who can refer you to a client. Get to know people at BNIs and networking events, and add them as friends on Facebook, connect with them on LinkedIn and follow them on Twitter.

Don’t Be a Spammer: Just like you’re turned off at a live networking event when someone pushes his product or service on you right away, on social media sites, you’ve got to build a rapport. Your first conversation with anyone on social media sites should be anything but “Do business with me.” On Facebook or LinkedIn, a good icebreaker is to join several groups and become a fan of pages and connect with members of the same group/page. Start up a discussion about an issue pertinent to the group or post in their forums. On Twitter, engage in conversations and reply to other users’ tweets.

Post Interesting Info: If you post useful, relevant and interesting info, people will be more likely to pay attention to you. Check out what your friends or followers are posting, and try to post news and info that are in a similar vein to connect over those topics.

Link to your Blog: Again, no one likes someone who only talks about their services, but you are on these sites to promote your business. Do it the smart way by linking to blog posts you’ve written, which will send traffic to your blog, or articles you find about the benefits of business coaching or articles about companies that have done better after getting a business coach. Avoid anything that is a blatant advertisement of yourself. Don’t have a blog yet? Start one, or link to blogs you like and read a lot. Like this one (okay, that was a shameless plug…but still, not a bad idea).

If you’ve been utilizing social media marketing strategies, comment below and let us know your success stories! To find out if you need to improve your marketing strategies, or other business issues, click here.

With the recession, charities' donations have decreased.

With the recent disaster in Haiti, many people and charities are reaching out via social media networks to raise funds.

But before the Haiti disaster, charities were increasing their social media efforts to attain potential donors…and it seems to have been working.

The Detroit News recently published an article about how charities are joining Twitter and Facebook in an effort to spread the word about charity events and recruit volunteers and donors, something that’s been a more urgent need in the down economy. An example they cite with Forgotten Harvest, a charity that supports impoverished areas that need food, is they had 100 volunteers for an event to help package 11,000 meals. And about a fifth of those volunteers were recruited online.

Even though charitable donations took a hit with the recession – in 2008, donations slid 2 percent from 2007, the first decline in donations since 1987 – E-philanthropy, giving donations online and recruiting volunteers, increased 4 percent that same year.

Charities are getting so savvy with social media marketing, that some have added their own apps for iPhones and Facebook. For example, the Salvation Army’s Red Kettle campaign has a facebook widget with a game that collects real donations.

ActionCOACH is making waves by marketing its own charitable campaign, Coaching for a Cause, on Twitter and Facebook. The end goal for the pro-bono business coaching campaign is raising $2.5 million and so far, with successful business coaching, $859,294 has been raised.

If it’s working for non-profits, social media marketing can work for small businesses and big businesses, too. Fine-tune your social media marketing skills and figure out what you can do to leverage your business this way.

On the other side of things, if you’re a social media whiz, you might consider how you can help charities with your expertise. Coaching charities — and businesses — does wonders in this economy.

Social media gurus don't look like this guy.

In this day and age, with social media marketing taking off like wildfire, social media consultants and gurus are popping up just about everywhere, ensuring that if you hire them, they’ll make your social media presence well-known faster than you could do it yourself.

But how credible are these “gurus”?

If you’re considering hiring one of these consultants to help you out, a piece of advice: check out their experience and make sure they have evidence that they helped increase sales for a company with their social media expertise. Because the trend of people branding themselves as “social media gurus” is not slowing down; The WhatsNextBlog first examined Twitter bios in May 2009 and found 4,487 people claiming to be social media experts. This month they examined Twitter bios again, and found 16,000 claiming expertise.

It’s true that social media marketing will help with business coaching, and also with business coaching clients. But with 16,000 experts online, be careful who you trust – and more importantly, who you pay to market your company.

Social media marketing is how many companies market campaigns today.

Regardless of whether you read BusinessCoaching.com regularly or not, unless you’ve been under a rock this last year, you should know that social media marketing efforts have increased — and have reaped great rewards. Track how many sales or clients you get from Twitter, APP, drive traffic to your website and ultimately, market yourself via the Internet and social media sites. Social media marketing is a great business coaching resource.

But if you’re still overwhelmed by how to market your company with all the sites and strategies out there, hopefully these five tips will help make it a bit clearer. You don’t have to use all the sites out there to market yourself.

1) Thoroughly explore your options: You don’t have to join the big sites like Facebook and Twitter to have an effective social media marketing campaign. There are several smaller, lesser-known sites that cater to specific niche audiences. For a list of these sites, click here.

2) Tailor your efforts to each site: It’s important to remember, especially if you’re marketing via niche sites, to interact with users in a manner they’ll relate to. Customize your message to every different audience you’re contacting so you’re “speaking their language.”

3) Track your efforts: It’s easier to do than it sounds. Incorporate shortened URLs when you campaign on each site. TinyURL, bit.ly and owl.ly are great free services that allow you to shorten a normal URL (key for Twitter, where you can only post 140 characters at a time), making it easier to share links, encourage others to spread the word, and make it easy to track your efforts, providing in-depth stats like where users who clicked the link are located and how many times each link was clicked. Then all that’s left to do is see what’s working, what’s not, and alter your campaign as needed.

4) Keep it real: No one likes spammers, shameless self-promotion or trained parrots. Don’t keep repeating the same things over and over again, or you won’t sound genuine at all…more like a repetitive ad. Also take into consideration that usually if you’re a big brand, you’ll be targeted more harshly. So be careful, but also be honest, be real, be interesting, and don’t insult people’s intelligence. The easiest way to do this is to touch on hot topics in the news, or newsworthy stories and issues that relate to your business and industry. These will attract attention, start conversations and will eventually relate to your message and draw even more attention to your campaign.

Mari Smith, Social Media Marketing Specialist Extraordinaire

Then meet Mari Smith.

Mari Smith is living proof that social media strategies work – she has only been active on Facebook and Twitter since 2007, but already has well over 8,000 friends and fans and Facebook, and an astounding 40,000+ following on Twitter.

She is a Relationship Marketing Specialist and Social Media Keynote Speaker, Trainer and Consultant. Dubbed the “Pied Piper of the Online World” by FastCompany.com, Smith helps independent professionals, entrepreneurs and business owners accelerate their business profits using an integrated social marketing strategy, with particular focus on Twitter and Facebook.

Her mission is to engage and educate CEOs and executives about social media to increase their skills, knowledge and integrity about social media, how to develop powerful profitable relationships using social media, and how these can help them. Business development coaching via social media is just what Smith specializes in.

She is an in-demand speaker for good reason – and she’s featured on Brad Sugars’ “Master Mentors” this week. If you’re still skeptical about whether social media marketing can really improve your business, listen to her audio interview here.

Marketing and advertising is very important in business – you want your company stuck in potential customers’ heads, and still stuck there for repeat business.

Derren Brown is a hypnotist, and he plays a trick on two men who work in a big London advertising agency.

You’ll see in the video the great lengths Brown went to put a subliminal message in both their minds – which, unfortunately, we all can’t do – but it proves how the power of advertising and having something everywhere that relates to your company really is powerful.