Sir Speedy Centennial

Are you concerned about the amount of time your staff is using your office computer for their personal work? You’re not alone. Does social networking help or hinder your business? It depends on your business.

Social networking can easily be the key to a successful online-marketing campaign, so having staff with particular skills in online socializing can be very beneficial. The downside may lay in how your staff is developing these skills.

According to WEBWIRE, Australian businesses are cracking down on their employees accessing social networking sites. New figures released by Telstra Business and managed internet-security specialists MessageLabs, now part of Symanetc, show a 400% increase in employer-blocked access to social networking sites over the better part of the past year.

In another report, BBC stated that according to employment law firm Peninsula, 233 million hours are lost every month as a result of employees wasting time on social networking. The study — based on a survey of 3,500 UK companies — concluded that businesses need to take firm action on the use of social networks at work.

Well, that’s one approach.

At the University of Melbourne, Dr Brent Coker, from the department of management and marketing, says that workers who engage in workplace internet leisure browsing, or WILB, are more productive than those who don’t. “People who do surf the internet for fun at work — within a reasonable limit of less than 20% of their total time in the office — are more productive by about 9% than those who don’t,” he says.

Let’s do the math: you let your employees spend 20% of their day (about 1.6 hours) surfing the net for personal enjoyment and you will gain 9% productivity. Assuming that you are gaining 9% on the balance, as the employer you’re still on the short end of that equation — unless you count the benefit to be gained by putting that surfing to work for you.

Let’s assume that your strategic marketing plan includes lots of social media promotion through Facebook®, LinkedIn®, Plaxo®, or MySpace®, to just a few of the more than 120 social networks currently online (there are six to ten new networks brought online each week). With all this bandwidth — that’s free — I’d have to question any campaign these days that does not take advantage of these venues. Here’s where all that surfing skill comes in handy.

Don’t be reluctant to engage your non-marketing staff in your marketing campaign. Everyone can pitch in. You’ll likely be surprised to find the talent pool within your walls.

The important consideration here is that everyone is on the same page. Ensure that all of your contributors have a marketing plan with approved messages from which to work. It’s not enough to turn them loose on the internet highway, you need to put up a road sign or two, and monitor, monitor, monitor.

We have a saying at my company: you’re not above taking out the trash — or helping with marketing.

As a customer of Sir Speedy Centennial, you have likely been using printed media to promote your company for years. With all the hoopla about electronic marketing, is print still relevant? The answer is yes — and the good news is they can be even more effective when you use electronic tools to help you assess and measure the success of the campaign.

A landing page is a dedicated web page on your site to which visitors are directed from a marketing vehicle — be that direct mail, email, print advertisement, or the like. The landing page is generally of the same design and messaging of the marketing vehicle used to direct them there. It is usually tightly focused on a particular product or service with the aim of getting the visitor to buy or take some form of action (this is called the call to action).

What gives you the all-important x-ray capability is that the page can be embedded with a code that allows reporting and tracking software for the web (often called analytics software) to count the number of people who visited the page, from what page they came, how long they stayed on the page, and to which page they went when they left.

This high level of visibility is very important in determining the effectiveness and ROI of your marketing campaign. If you have targeted your marketing piece so that you have two versions (one with 50% off and one with $10 off), by directing the customer to two different landing pages, you can see which type of offer — and which call to action — did a better job of motivating your customer. Armed with the knowledge that your customers responded better to the dollars-off version, I’ll just bet that your next campaign only includes a dollars-off message.

Create landing pages for everything.

The best way to measure visitors and follow their path through your site is to create landing pages specifically for each and every campaign and each version of the campaign. Don’t be timid about creating as many pages as you need to gain that visibility and help you understand your customers’ behavior — many times you will find that one is simply not enough.

Sir Speedy Centennial is a great resource

At Sir Speedy Centennial, we can help you make your next marketing campaign not only more effective but measurable as well. Phone us today at 303-799-4383 click here to send us an email. If you prefer, complete this form and one of our team members will respond to you promptly.