Social Media Lessons to Learn from TamilNadu Weatherman Posts
Who is the Tamilnadu weatherman and what are his posts about?
When massive floods hit Tamil Nadu in December 2015, a silent hero rose to the occasion. This silent hero from Chennai started a revolution in the world of weather forecasts.
During this unprecedented flooding, most cities in Tamil Nadu had a power outage and continuous rains. The rain kept pounding each day, and the only hope people had was that the tough time would pass.
This is when our Chennai weatherman Pradeep John or PJ as he is called in his personal circle, stepped in and became a hero.
Pradeep John, now, popularly known as the Tamilnadu weatherman posted regular updates on the cloud patterns on his Facebook page. He also forecasted the possibility of rains in the coming days based on scientific data and analysis.
This Tamil Nadu weatherman’s interpretations were spot on.
His love for numbers stemmed from the fact that he has an MBA in finance!!
In the world of Facebook, he is known as the Tamil Nadu weatherman or Chennai weatherman. He has more than half a million followers on Facebook, and his following is growing exponentially.
But he is more than just a weatherman. He is an individual who is passionate about the weather and its changing patterns. For all wannabe weathermen who want to learn weather patterns and cloud behavior, he would be the perfect guide as his posts are very descriptive and enlightening.
Digital Marketers can learn a lot from this Tamil Nadu weatherman.
One biggest lesson would be – How to use social media for a good cause and educate people, in his case about the weather.
He considers himself to be a pluviophile. The meaning of the word pluviophile~ (n.) a lover of rain; someone who finds joy and peace of mind during rainy days
In Tamil Nadu, it is was a usual practice of people to start the day by reading newspapers or visiting a temple.
But with the advent of digital media, times have changed now. People now open Facebook first thing in the morning and most of them check what Tamil Nadu weatherman posts today.
This is the impact he has created over a few years.
The critical factor which makes him stand out is the accuracy of his weather forecast.
In December 2016, When the Vardah storm hit Chennai, he was the first person to issue a warning about a “very severe” cyclonic storm hitting Tamil Nadu’s shores. He posted this on Facebook, asking people not to venture out sharing that the cyclone looks deadly.
After his regular updates and warnings, the schools, colleges, and offices were shut in Tamil Nadu.
His Facebook page is most sought after by people, and he takes a lot of pain to keep updating the page because he is concerned for the well-being of people.
He is a great humanitarian, and when he is not sharing weather forecasts, he inspires people with his quotes.
In one of his interviews, he has quoted “It’s not always about the knowledge. It is how you connect to the people that defines you”.
How are his weather forecasts accurate?
How does he get this data on the weather?
He spends around INR 20,000 per annum out of his pocket to get the weather data and study it. He has the thirst to gain knowledge in the weather domain and share it with people.
The Tamilnadu weather man himself has posted on Facebook that he has been mysteriously helped on several occasions by strangers. To quote Paul Coelho “And, when you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it”.
This has resulted in almost all his forecasts being near to accurate.
What are the Social Media Marketing Lessons To Learn From this Tamil Nadu Weatherman?
1. Help People & Answer Their Key Questions (solve problems):
As a blogger, influencer or Social Media Marketer, always identify the critical issues of your audience first. Then see how you can address them through your blogs/updates on social media channels. This is exactly what this Chennai weatherman does. He identifies the critical problems of people during Chennai Rains and addresses them in his posts. Millions of people search in Google for “Tamilnadu weatherman posts today” and read his posts.
His Facebook updates usually get thousands of shares and also get widely circulated on Whatsapp groups. In Tamil Nadu, when people plan their travel, they first see his Facebook page before they leave their homes/offices.
2. Focus on One core Digital Channel:
Many Social Media Marketers tend to use a lot of Channels and try to post and optimize all channels for their success. The two things to learn from his success story are –
Understand Where your customers are.
Which channel you are most comfortable with.
Chennai alone has 7.5 million users on Facebook, close to about 15 million people from Tamil Nadu. So, Instead of focusing on Instagram, Twitter and other channels Pradeep concentrates only on Facebook – a platform that the Tamil Nadu audience is most comfortable with.
He has now connected his Facebook updates with his Twitter profile which gets him additional attention because of his great content and popularity.
3. Simplify Complex Things:
This Tamil Nadu weatherman has the ability to simplify the complex graphical representations about the weather and explain in a simple manner. Here is an example of one of his interpretations – “The rain band is a snake-shaped cloud”. This helps the common man to take a look at his representations and understand them quickly.
4. Be Consistent:
Many users of Social Media start their journey with a bang. They share several posts in a spark but later fade away. Pradeep John doesn’t wait for Monsoon season to share his weather updates (which he is most known for), even during the summer season his page is active. He gives regular updates on Heatwaves in the summer season, shares inspirational quotes memes, real images, quick videos, links to articles and more to engage his audience.
He is consistent with his posts though he claims that he is not doing it full time.
In the days of rain, I break this self-imposed rule – says this remarkable Tamilnadu weatherman.
How do you use LinkedIn for Marketing B2B?
A
re you in the B2B business and struggling with business growth?
Are you struggling to generate new leads, get new clients or generate new referrals?
Do you want to be seen as a go-to expert in your industry and have clients approaching you for your expertise?
Then you must use LinkedIn Marketing, especially for B2B.
Why?
Because LinkedIn is the only networking platform that can act as a complete business development opportunity for your B2B.
I know LinkedIn may appear to be an intimidating social network to use for you. It was for me as well until I understood how to use it and was able to attract new business opportunities.
It is daunting if you don’t know how to use it.
First, realize the power LinkedIn has to offer. LinkedIn gives you access to millions of highly successful people working at some of the most premium companies around the world. And all these people are available to you online without moving out of your office.
Imagine if you had to hire a marketing person for a similar role.
How difficult it is to get the right person and how much will be time and expenses involved?
What if this person leaves the job after a few months?
What if he joins your competitor?
He not only leaves your growth mid-way but also has all your Network contacts.
Whereas LinkedIn stays with you forever with all its connections.
Check out the LinkedIn B2B Facts below
Isn’t it amazing?
How do you use LinkedIn for marketing b2b?
Here are three steps to help you maximize your B2B marketing Success Rate with LinkedIn.
1. Connect to Your Ideal Prospects
LinkedIn is a great platform to find and connect with potential partners, customers, and clients. You can build relationships with them in the form of connections.
LinkedIn offers you various choices to build the right kind of connection that your business needs.
Be careful not to rack up your connections as most people do on social media platforms. LinkedIn is about building quality connections. It’s not only just connecting with present and past colleagues but, more importantly, connecting with the right prospective clients.
You need to be focused and attract Ideal clients and business opportunities with your profile.
You should have a clear goal to have your connections to buy into you and then buy from you.
You need to be proactive about connecting with professionals whom you see as potential clients or partners. And be very specific about who you want to reach.
The “who” is the Key and it’s very important to define it in advance.
While your product, service, or solution could work for several audiences, you have to be very clear about the clients you prefer working with.
What is your Niche?
Who do you help the most?
What types of professionals are the key decision-makers for your business than others?
Answers to these questions will help you identify who to target while sending out your connection requests on LinkedIn.
With your Niche and Ideal client clearly defined, LinkedIn allows you to search your prospects by industry, location, job title, etc. You can also search based on company size and many other parameters which you can use to hone on your ideal clients.
You can then begin to send these prospects connection requests. Add a personal message with each request, clearly stating why you want to connect with them.
Do this daily & consistently. LinkedIn does NOT allow you to send a large number of requests to people in a single day. It has daily limits to the number of requests and messages you can send each day to avoid spamming.
Think of it this way.
If you have a marketing person, he cannot reach all prospects in a single day. He will engage with a few potential prospects each day and within a few months, he will have a large funnel of prospects to work with.
Similarly, with LinkedIn, you need to engage with a few prospects daily and within a few months, you will have created a large connection pool for your business.
Consistency with sustained effort is the game-changer here.
2. Nurture your LinkedIn Connections
Let’s be honest here. If you own a business, you want to make money. You probably also have a great product or service that genuinely helps people. So once the connection is made the immediate desire is to sell and make an income.
As a business owner, you’re probably extremely busy and eager to do the sale at the earliest so that it contributes to your bottom line.
Refrain from doing this. Networking on LinkedIn is not about an immediate sale but about nurturing your connections.
Let’s be honest here. If you own a business, you want to make money. You probably also have a great product or service that genuinely helps people. So once the connection is made, the immediate desire is to sell and make an income.
As a business owner, you’re probably extremely busy and eager to make the sale at the earliest so that it contributes to your bottom line.
Refrain from doing this. Networking on LinkedIn is not about an immediate sale but about nurturing your connections.
Nurture Your Network |
LinkedIn is a long-term game. You need to nurture your connection which will in the future generate new business, which will lead to future earnings.
Once you have a connection made, you need to strategically send messages on a regular basis to stay on top of their mind.
It’s important that you refrain from bombarding your prospects with information. Go gentle. Send them useful blogs, articles, and webinars that may be helpful to them and pertain to their business.
The key here is to provide value to them so that you stay on top of their mind.
You just need to say that you’re reaching out to share some valuable information. Explain to them what you’re sharing and why it’s beneficial to them. The goal here is not to sell them with a hard pitch but to provide value and become the go-to expert in your industry.
The simple reason is he may not need your service right now.
But if you stay top of their mind, you’ll be the first person they think of when they do.
And you can do that by saying the right things in the right sequence. Don’t be too eager to make an immediate sale. When you are too eager, you can do more harm than good.
Nurture your prospects and you can have success with these connections r whom you would otherwise never have had the chance to meet.
3. Manage your LinkedIn with a CRM or other Tracking System
The final and most important step is to manage your LinkedIn with a CRM or other Tracking System. One of the biggest mistakes people make with LinkedIn Marketing is not properly documenting their progress and results.
Get Organized.
As once you start getting connected with hundreds of people and sending several messages, it may get confusing to manage them. I suggest you manage your LinkedIn with a CRM or other tracking system from the beginning.
If you don’t want to invest in a CRM system then manage your progress with regular updates in an Excel file.
You just need to follow this 3-step system and then the process will give you the desired results.
If you follow the steps mentioned in this blog the results you will achieve will be nothing short of stunning.
So Get Started with LinkedIn!
As a fellow business owner, I know you’re busy.
You may not have enough time to get the most out of LinkedIn even though it is a great source for generating new business. Then make sure you delegate it to someone but don’t avoid using LinkedIn for marketing purposes.
If you want to implement these strategies with predictable outcomes feel free to connect with us.
Click here to read the Ultimate B2BMarketing Guide
Remember, LinkedIn is the world’s largest Business to Business network with over 450 million users and you need today on top of it to grow your business.
Ultimate Guide to B2B Marketing
B
usiness to Business Marketing, or B2B Marketing as it is popularly known, is very different than marketing to individual consumers.
It is a clear contrast with B2C marketing, where the consumer or the buyer is often an individual and the purchase decision is faster.
What is B2B marketing?
B2B Marketing refers to all marketing efforts, tactics, and strategies directed at other businesses or organizations to create awareness of your business brand.
If your company sells products or services to other businesses or organizations and does not direct consumers, you must use B2B marketing strategies.
In B2B marketing, you will target the needs, interests, and challenges of individuals making purchases on behalf of their organization rather than for themselves. In this case, the organization is the customer and the individual is the point of contact.
As a B2B marketer, your target audience typically includes business executives, procurement officers, and others who make purchasing decisions for their businesses or organizations.
Like everything else in the business world, B2B marketing has gone digital. In fact, according to Accenture’s recent report, more than 67 percent of B2B transactions have already started to begin online.
Digital disruption has become a blessing for B2B marketing, but it’s not without challenges.
Businesses that have yet to shift online find it even more challenging than ever to do online B2B Marketing.
Even otherwise, effective online B2B marketing is challenging to get right for many businesses.
Businesses have a lot to juggle between budget limits, growth demands, and channel decisions when developing their online B2B marketing strategy.
In this ultimate guide, I’ll explain everything you need to know to take your B2B marketing to the next level.
Understanding B2B Marketing will help you to generate more leads, improve lead quality and bring in new business.
Before you learn online B2B marketing, it is pertinent to understand two essential aspects:
- Buyer Persona or Target Customer
- Buyer’s journey.
This is because, For a B2B marketing strategy to be successful, you must know and target the right audience. A solid B2B digital marketing strategy starts with defining your target audience or buyer persona.
Secondly, understanding the B2B buyer’s journey is one of the most critical elements in marketing strategy. If you understand what your buyers are doing in the buying journey, you will help them move from one stage of the B2B buyer’s journey to the next.
1. Identify Your Target Customer
The most significant determinant of effective online marketing is your target audience or buyer persona.
B2B marketing usually focuses on a small audience of groups composed of one or more decision-makers.
You need to define this target audience or group and create your buyer persona.
How to define the Target Audience or Buyer Persona?
To find the Target Audience, you need to develop a Customer Avatar.
Two important aspects for developing a Customer Avatar are Demographics and Psycho-graphics information.
Learn their Demo-graphics information like:
- Age
- Gender
- Occupation
- Ethnicity
- Geo-location
- Education level
- Religion
Demographics is defined as statistical data about the characteristics of a person.
Learn their Psycho-graphics information like:
- Personality characteristics
- Lifestyle
- Social class
- Attitudes
- Hobbies
- Spending Habits
- Principles & beliefs
- Activities & Interests
- Likes & Dislikes
Often buyers are guided by their attitudes and subjective perceptions when making purchase decisions, and psycho-graphics covers such aspects of the buying process.
Demographics explain “who” your buyer is, while psychographics explains “why” they buy.
You can only effectively reach your target audience when you understand their demographics and psychographics. The combination of both sets of data starts to form your buyer persona.
With these details, narrow down the customers to one person.
Learn the art of communicating with that person better. It is now a one-on-one conversation with that person.
All your marketing activity will utilize this demographic and psychographic information after that, ensuring your content and digital material are absorbed by the right eyes and ears.
2. Understanding the Buyers Journey
A B2B buyer’s journey is buying a new product or service from a business. It is the “path” that the buyer takes before making a purchase decision. A B2B buyer’s journey is unique in that a B2B customer is often more than a single customer.
In B2B, you are selling to an entire team or group of people, all of whom might have input in the purchase decision. Hence, the decision-making process is longer and more tedious.
B2B customers usually identify pain points, investigate, and gain approval from upper management before purchasing.
This results in a longer buying cycle and as a B2B customer is not prone to buying on impulse.
The average B2B buying cycle is 6-12 months.
Marketers, therefore, have to adjust their B2B marketing strategy.
There are 3 Core Stages of B2B Buyer’s Journey.
Stage 1: Awareness
In this stage, you pull all your potential customers into the funnel by creating awareness about your company’s business brand, product, and solutions. In this stage, you meet potential customers researching products and services or looking for options that could solve their problems or meet their needs.
In the awareness stage of the B2B buyer’s journey, your potential customer acknowledges a problem or challenge they face that must be solved. However, they may not know of the existence of your company. Your marketing strategy is to create awareness for your product or service.
Your potential customer researches to find a solution to their problem. 72% of B2B buyers will turn to Google or LinkedIn at the research stage.
Businesses are more aware of their problems and are, therefore, more specific in their search.
Companies that know their buyers’ persona present their information at this B2B buyer’s journey stage.
Though B2B customers want to know your product’s or service’s value, they are more interested in facts and stats, customer reviews, etc.
Your presentation and content should concentrate on their pain point.
The B2B awareness stage is a good time to build customer trust in your brand and products.
To create awareness, your online marketing strategy should include anything that enables you to reach new prospects on relevant platforms.
Here you have two choices.
- Leverage paid promotions on LinkedIn & Google for quick results
- Grow organically on LinkedIn and Google.
I always recommend the organic option for better results, but you may also try paid promotion.
Why? Because PPC ads on Google will give you instant leads, the quality of leads may be low. On the other hand, an influential google ranking can help you not only drive traffic to your website but also build brand credibility.
Blogging on relevant topics your target audience spends time reading and staying updated is also a great idea to create awareness among an already established audience and prospective customers.
If your buyer is already a connection on LinkedIn, it will add a lot of weight, recall factor, and trust to your profile.
Stage 2: Consideration stage
This is the second stage of the B2B buyer’s journey, and it’s chiefly dedicated to considerations and comparisons between products and services. The B2B buyer’s journey moves from awareness to Consideration. This stage can be called the investigation stage.
During the consideration stage, the potential customer has narrowed their scope to one or two vendors. 70% of buyers return to your website at least 2-3 times during this research stage. The nature of the content presented on your website strongly affects whether the customer will pursue your company.
Here your B2B customers often require greater nurturing time.
“B2B marketers say they see at least a 30% increase in sales opportunities through lead nurturing.”
Your potential customer will compare your company and other competitors at a stage in their research. At this stage of the B2B buyer’s journey, they reach out to sales reps for further clarification, product demos, and personalized services.
Your customer conducts further research and eliminates vendors that need to meet their requirements. At this stage of the B2B buyer’s journey, you’ll need several conversations to “move” them to the next stage in the B2B buyer’s journey.
Stage 3: Decision Stage
In this final B2B buyer’s journey stage, the potential buyer decides to purchase the product or service.
At this stage, the lead has completed all research processes, gained upper management’s support and is ready to select a vendor and make a purchase.
Lead nurturing has finally translated to lead conversion.
As I mentioned, 67 % of the B2B buyer's journey is done digitally.
So how do you carry out your B2B Digital Marketing?
LinkedIn is one of the most powerful social media tools to carry out your B2B Marketing.
Why Your Facebook Ad Not Delivering
Want to know the reasons why your Facebook Ad Not Delivering?
F
acebook plays a significant role in Social Media Marketing.
Facebook advertising is now becoming the cheapest and best way in social media marketing to advertise online; sometimes, it produces results better than the likes of Google ads and other traditional web ads.
Till you grow your network on Facebook organically, the only way your business will be seen on the social media network by a vast majority of people is by Facebook ads.
A key advantage of Facebook ads is their ability to reach the exact audience or prospects.
Facebook ad is considered one of the most targeted forms of advertising in social media marketing. You can advertise to people by age, interests, behavior, location, marital status, etc. If you know your customer persona, you can use Facebook advertising to engage them meaningfully.
But your Facebook ad may produce different results than expected. There could be some common mistakes that may jeopardize your Facebook advertising campaign.
Here are Five reasons or mistakes that you may be making for the Facebook ad not delivering to your expectation:
1. Not able to reach out to the target audience. This is one of the primary reasons why Facebook advertising doesn’t work for some people. Don’t focus on too broad an area, such as interests. Interests targeting is not as accurate as we think they are, and hence should not be the main focus for targeting.
2. Targeting the right set of people but with the wrong offerings. For example, those who subscribe to your mailers or free services target them for sales. But, target those who landed on your website to build your list rather than for sales.
3. You are targeting the right people with the right offering but not with the right messages. In such cases, ensure your message is impactful and crisp to drive the desired results.
4. Your budget is either too low or too high. The budget you set should be decided based on several factors so that it is just right for your campaign. If your budget is too high, you might be overspending and exceeding your marketing costs which can result in a loss for your business. Also, if the budget you set is too low, you may not be able to compete with your competition.
5.You might be focusing on the metrics that do not bring good results. Some advertisers are confused if they should focus on CMP, CTR, or CPC. Again, know your ad objective and see what metric would be suitable for your objective. For example, if your ad objective is conversion, then the metric you should focus on is Cost per conversion, not CTR or anything else.
If you do this well, you can lay a strong foundation for your social media marketing campaign on Facebook.
