GenX Marketing Advice from Forrester Research

Targeting Generation X? Try Word of Mouth

[Excerpted from 8/28/2009 Forrester Research article by Nate Elliott]

If you're a marketer targeting Gen X consumers (between 30 and 43), and you're not using social media or influence marketing, it's time to reevaluate your strategy.

This audience is surprisingly engaged with social media. They're more active than average on nearly every rung of our social technographics ladder -- especially as joiners, with 59% of Gen X consumers telling us they use social networks at least once each month. Best of all, many are using social influence to make product recommendations: 42% say they often tell friends about the products and services that interest them.

So if you want to leverage this sharing behavior to reach Gen X consumers (or any other socially active online audience, for that matter), what should you do?

• Give all your customers the tools they need to share. Tools like ShareThis and AddThis make it easy to add sharing functionality to your site. And don't forget: as valuable as Twitter and Facebook can be for driving word of mouth, most people make product recommendations through private channels like e-mail and IM.
• Find -- and leverage -- your brand advocates. Mine your sales database to find your most loyal and valuable customers, and run surveys to find users who think most highly of your brand and are most likely to pass the word along.
• Don't forget the power of offline influence. Online influence can work wonders, but offline influence is both more common (see Figure 11) and more powerful (see page 18). Savvy marketers are using social media to organize offline events where customers can energize each other around products and brands, and to create and manage ambassador programs that extend both online and off.

My Take

Nate's practical advice and clear data is compelling.

Bottom line - if your target clients are aged 30 to 43, they're using social media to talk about you. It's a race between you and your competitors - the earlier you engage your customers and neighbors on social media there the more new sales you'll book.

Do Local Businesses Need a Social Media Strategy?

They do if they want to grow like crazy!

Business finds success through social networking Play video

(Excerpted from 7/28/2009 NECN report by Peter Howe) - Louis E. Page Inc. , a 116-year-old Massachusetts company is proving to be a raging success story for how to use social networking and other online tools to increase sales and sales leads.

The company supplemented its mailed-out catalog and ads in specialty magazines with a website about five years ago, but the big breakthrough came last December, when Duncan Page added a blog that he calls The Fence Post.

Since then, he has had an 850 percent increase in sales leads.

One article Duncan wrote was about how to use something called woven wire fencing to build a horse paddock. Guess how many people have downloaded it? More than 1,500.

Page said his typical blog post is "just an article about the products. We don't say you should buy this from us. We don't really refer to ourselves at all. It's really important to the whole marketing effort to blog and sort of become known as an authority and a trusted authority on what you're selling.''

"One of the things I've learned is that it really works,'' Page said. As Louis Page & Co. enters its 117th year, the namesake's grandson's looking ahead ... to video blogging. "I would like to get into video, is one thing, because that's very effective to be able to actually show somebody rather than have to write and describe it with words.''

My Take

What a perfect illustration of a trusted, established business using social media to leverage its reputation and its profile among its customers and prospective customers.