Marketing Study Lab - Actionable Marketing Knowledge: Sweet Social Media Strategies with Nicole Osborne the Founder of Lollipop Social

Hello, I’m the Lego Master of Marketing!

Odd statement to start a profile, but go with it, it’ll make sense.

You know when you have loads of Lego all over the floor and it just looks like one big pile of nothingness. Not only does it look a mess, it’s a pain when you stand on it.

I take these bricks and start to make sense of how they all fit together.

If your marketing feels like a pile of painful Lego, let’s chat and get those building blocks fitting together: peter@marketingstudylab.co.uk

Why is this an issue?

The biggest problem facing todays marketing departments is the severe lack of qualified marketers, which usually happens by accident.

It’s not your fault, this usually happens by accident.

Perhaps there was an immediate need to design a website or create some literature and you needed someone to coordinate this – before you know it, Mark is the new marketing department.

Maybe your business has experienced some rapid growth, expanded and was looking to promote within or Andrea from customer service fancied her hand at marketing and is now in charge of all corporate comms.

Or perhaps your competition is way too active on social media and you feel you need to be present on this platform as well. Get Hayley to post ‘stuff’ – she’s young enough to understand how to do this.

You get the idea!

These circumstances lead to 100s of hours of wasted time and money by focusing on the short-term tactics rather than a long-term strategic approach that will make a difference.

Even worse than this, the misplaced management of employees creates missed business opportunities, leaving money on the table that many didn't even know was there!

Hello, I’m Peter!
I can help with this.

I’ve been there, seen Marketing Departments churning out worthless tactical marketing communications that do nothing but damage a company’s reputation, wasting peoples time and reducing, not building long-term brand value.

I specialise in training programmes that will alter the mind-set of lost / forgotten / unqualified marketer's, by developing the skills needed to confidently create successful, long-term marketing strategies that generate business opportunities.

How is this done? Tell me, tell me now!

Quite simply by removing the pain points and problems than many marketers face as they haven’t had the training or been given the opportunity to develop their marketing skills through;

Strategic Marketing Planning
Professional Marketing Qualifications
Marketing Training Days
Mentoring
Tutoring

Any business that is not benefiting from the opportunities marketing will create is missing out MASSIVELY! The chances are that the marketing tactics that are being deployed focus on pushing the wrong messages of ‘Buy. This. Now’ to the wrong people (who don’t even care you exist), creating minimal awareness and even less success.

Positioning a company through a strategic marketing approach, not only carves out a point of difference for a company to differentiate themselves from the competition, but creates a unique proposition within the marketplace that highlights the problems it helps to fix for those that care enough to seek out this solution. Moving a company from a wasteful and unwanted push strategy to one that creates value where customers will actively gravitate towards this value proposition.

This changes your marketing and the marketing department from being viewed as a cost centre that haemorrhages money, to the department that creates value and saves money in the long-term.

And here’s a little bit of social proof for you:

‘It is refreshing to see someone with a passion for the profession producing such valuable content for others to learn from.’

‘He was genuine and very honest in his approach and it was a pleasure working through this with Peter. An ‘out of the box’ thinker, he enabled me to consider different approaches'.

Happy Marketing
Peter

www.marketingstudylab.co.uk

I would love to get your feedback on how I can improve the podcast or what you would like to hear in forthcoming episodes so either leave a comment or contact me directly - peter@marketingstudylab.co.uk

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Sweet Social Media Strategies with Nicole Osborne the Founder of Lollipop Social - Episode 49

Mar 5, 2019

How do you cross-sell? How can be of benefit to a business? And what options do we have when implementing this type of strategy. If you don't know we’ll be chatting about it later.

But first, let's chat to Nicole Osborne, the founder of Lollipop Social a company that provides social media management, consultancy, coaching, strategic development and advertising strategies. Nicole is also a proud Chartered Marketer, studying and achieving this status via the CIM.

Takeaways

- What do you want to be known for?

This is where your social content should be focused. Yes, from a holistic view your content needs to be varied, but the overall objective and underlying themes should always be consistent be it looking to sell cars or cans of soup!

- Nicole’s formula for creating an excellent social strategy follows 9 key steps, I’ve narrowed these down into 7 stages which are:

First and foremost, understand the needs of the business
Use customer personas to define the market and the platforms that should be used
Each platform will require a bespoke strategy that also fits in with the entire Marketing Strategy
Optimise each platform to maximize exposure
Look to the key influencers within the same marketplace
Create a content strategy that is consistent, on message and on brand
And remember you must measure and monitor via each platforms metrics.

Nicole refers to this as the Test, Measure, Reflect and Refine model and it works for me.

- And finally, lets bring it back to your studies with a study buddy, which we’ve spoken about in the past on episode 28, but what Nicole highlighted was the fact that a study buddy provides accountability, giving you motivation and encouragement with your CIM Qualifications. So go get one!

Cross-Selling

There are many different ways we can cross-sell before, during and after a purchase or decision has been made by a customer. But what is it?

Cross-selling is the action of selling more than was originally anticipated to an existing customer.

There are loads of great examples but I like to think Amazon do this best, attributing around 35% of all sales to the “customers who bought this item also bought” and “frequently bought together” options.

Other examples range from a car sale including additional features to a fast food outlet asking if you want extra fries with your meal.

What are the benefits of this? Well, there is the obvious of the increased revenue from a customer who is already buying from you. But other benefits such as the introduction of a new / unknown product or service to a customer could extend the customer life cycle or selling existing stock so that you can replace it with newer items. These items should always be linked in some way and offer a benefit to the customer unless there is a danger of isolating them and potentially losing their customer all together.

Happy Marketing Everyone!
Peter
www.marketingstudylab.co.uk
www.linkedin.com/company/marketing-study-lab/
www.facebook.com/marketingstudylab/
https://twitter.com/mktstudylab
(@mktstudylab)

Music Featured on this Podcast:
Sleepy in the Garden
Lobo Loco www.musikbrause.de
Creative Commons License

Links
Nicole Osborne
https://lollipopsocial.co.uk
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nicoleosborne1/
Twitter: @Lollipop_Social

Books:
Steal the Show – Michael Port: https://amzn.to/2VtObEe

App:
Trello: https://trello.com

Theory:
Pomodoro Technique: https://francescocirillo.com/pages/pomodoro-technique