Implementing a good system is an important step in your social media investment. However, you will need to measure its effectiveness which can be a bit arduous with the current tools available. By using the traditional marketing theory “test, track, adjust”, you will eventually create the perfect processes for your social media tracking.

Now in the world of social media, how does one “test, track and adjust” accordingly? First, document each step within the social media program you plan to implement. Identify the social channels for engagements, program dashboards and API connections to autopost to the channels, develop a calendar for you and your employees to follow for message creation and engagements, and finally, know where to find your tracking information. Here are a few areas we examine each week:

1. Study the analytics from your website. Google provides a great and free analytics tool that is relatively easy to install into your website. You can view clicks to pages and content to see what is hot with your audience. Examine your traffic sources to determine where people are coming from off of the internet. Just start clicking various analytics and begin to watch the changes over time. Then adjust to your findings.

2. Examine your Facebook insights each week. This great new tool in Facebook now shows demographics, how many people you are reaching and interactions on your business page. If you see a hot topic, talk about it some more!

3. Check how many people view your LinkedIn profile each week. With increased activity on both online and offline networking, more and more people will be looking at your professional profile. The paid version of LinkedIn will even tell you who!

4. Twitter can be a bit of  moving target. We really like TweetStats to monitor the engagement of our staff and clients, who we retweet, our keyword hash cloud and time of day of posts. However, this tool is not enough to see how often you are being retweeted and shared, which is the other half of a Twitter strategy. To track this component, we really like RetweetRank. The biggest disappointment so far is that centralized tool to track Twitter does not seem to be affordable just yet. (I will keep you posted:))

5. View your Klout score regularly. You can determine how influential you are in your social circles by measuring your influence. The Klout Score measures your influence on a scale of 1 to 100. A higher score means you are driving more online interactions to others in your network.

Remember to review your social media system periodically to make sure it is still working. The more documentation you can create, the easier it will be to teach employees how to run your social media system. Do this in all areas of your your business! When you are ready to sell, the value of your business will also be higher because you have effectively created an instruction manual of policies and procedures.

Many years ago there were four components universally acknowledged to be the foundation of marketing: Product, Price, Place (distribution), and Promotion. We called them the 4 P’s.

Get those right, the thinking went, and the next stop on the trolley would be Easy Street.

But guess what – there are more marketing P’s to address these days, because of the myriad ways in which we experience and interact in the world and how much wider that world has gotten as a result. In this new age, the customer is in control – and not afraid to let us know it.

What that means to us as business owners is that we now have to go above and beyond. Marketing is no longer just a catchy slogan and some splashy ads. Now it’s about making sure that every element of the customer experience is aligned so that the expectations you create match the actual experience of your customers – at every touch point.

Different marketers have their own set of marketing P’s, and the basic 4 P’s are still the place to start, but here are my votes for the next set of marketing P’s to help your business succeed:

P #5: Purchaser. The center of your marketing focus should be defining your target customer; the segment of the population and or business community that you want to attract and keep as customers.

P #6: People. A superior customer experience comes down to your employees, the people you have speaking to customers. Are they smart, professional and pleasant and can they really help your customers? And while you’re hiring and training the right people, don’t overlook how you motivate them. It’s a basic tenet of psychology that you get the action you reward – so if you’re rewarding for xxxxx, don’t expect yyyyy.

P #7: Process. What do your customers have to go through to buy from you or get information about your products and services? Is it easy and painless, transparent and self-evident – or do they need an instruction manual? If they call you, how long does it take to reach the person who can actually help them? Your customer is busy – and they want a simple process to get answers and help.

The “simple is good” mantra also applies to your employees. If it’s too difficult or onerous to sell a product or service, they’ll find a way not to do it.

P #8: Positioning. It’s your brand, your reputation, what you’re known for. In this brave new world, nobody can be all things to all people. Being equally good at everything means not being very good at anything. So you have to stake out a market niche and meet those people’s needs very, very well.

To determine your position, finish this sentence: My company is the one that does this better than my competition: _______.

If you answered, “provides friendly service” – then yikes! You should consider some marketing intervention to clarify what this really means to your customers as well as make sure you are actually delivering on this promise. Or better yet, get help to develop a stronger and more unique message for your most important Purchasers – your 5th P.

P #9: Purpose. So why are you doing what you’re doing – what messages are you communicating about why you are in business and how is this different than the competition? And what do your employees think is most important –are they on the same page and if not, is their message the one you really want your customers to hear?

So that’s my vote for the 9 P‘s of Marketing – let us know what you think!

Lauren O’Connell is President of O’Connell Consulting Group, Inc. a professional marketing firm that specializes in developing customized and measurable marketing solutions for small businesses to help them acquire new profitable customers and retain and cross sell existing customers. Lauren can be reached at lauren@oconnellconsultinggroup.com.

Ever wonder how the social media networks play into search engine directories? Linked In is searched in a few places by the world of Google, Chrome, and Bing. Known as “hotspots”, these are the only areas that are searchable so you want to make sure all your key words are in those areas.

·         The line right under your name.

·         Specialties: Add all titles and industries for which you may be considered.

·         Job Titles

·         Interests: Copy and paste what you have under specialties.

Starting a business around your passion can be a challenge. After all, being a life coach or guiding nature tours is your real passion; not running a business. There are three areas to concentrate before marketing can even be considered: how will you manage your time, how will you collect money and pay bills, and how will you find clients.

Develop processes to manage these areas that fit naturally with your own habits; an envelope to keep receipts, calendering out your week, a Facebook page or very simple website to tell people about yourself… If you discover you are not enjoying the task, you can eventually outsource it to someone who really does get joy from bookkeeping or marketing. Use these three areas to measure how you spend time and resources when working on your business.

Once you have these down, the rest will fall into line and let you know when they need attention.