Social Small Biz Case Study: Clear Thought Consulting

In no more than 50 words explain what your business is.

Clear Thought Consulting Ltd works with small businesses to equip them with the marketing strategies, skills, suppliers, and set-up that they need to become bigger businesses. We firmly believe that when you can’t out-spend the competition, you have to out-think them.

How do you use social media as a business?

We use social media to promote our own business, and we also help our clients to put together devastatingly simple social media plans to generate interest for their products and services.

• For Clear Thought, we target small business owners in the South West. We use social media in the following ways:
• Post links back to thought leadership content on our website
• Connect and engage with potential clients and referrers in the local area
• Keep up to date with news, views and comment

In the last 18 months Clear Thought has generated over £250,000 of business for marketing suppliers in the South West. This doesn’t include any business that our clients have generated as a result of the social media plans we’ve run on their behalf. This is just from leads that have come to Clear Thought, mainly through LinkedIn or Twitter, which we’ve fulfilled ourselves or passed to one of our network of preferred suppliers.

What are your business/marketing objectives for social media?

We aim to generate 20% of our website traffic from social media sources. We also have a lead generation target. Social media contributes significantly to this.

Each Clear Thinker has to have a meaningful engagement with 10 people in our target audience each month – a chat on social media can fulfil this target. In terms of income targets, on past performance we’re confident that social media can generate at least 50% of our new business target in the next year.

Do you measure the success of your social media marketing? If so, how?

Yes. We do this is various ways. We track sources to our website, and set various traffic and on-site activity goals. We use a variety of tools to do this, the key ones are bit.ly and Google Analytics. We also track the source of every lead, so that we know where our business ultimately stemmed from.

How does social media fit in with the other marketing your company does?

Content is at the heart of our marketing. We write regular Blogs, release regular webcasts, etc. Social media is the main source of readers for this activity. If the content is any good, that draws people into engagement with us. We also supplement our networking with online activity. We have a handshake / business card collection strategy that hooks straight into LinkedIn and funnels people into a permission marketing set-up.

Do you have plans to increase your use of social media in 2010?

I’m not sure we could do much more!

What would be your top 3 tips for businesses looking to get involved in social media?

1. Be there: work out where people you want to do business with hang out online and be there. Join Forums, LinkedIn Groups, etc.
2. Be relevant: Make available interesting or relevant content, like Blogs, Forum comments, presentations, etc. that your audience will find genuinely useful.
3. Be proven: Link your comments and content to proof, like case studies and testimonials.

Thanks! Don’t forget you can keep up with future case studies by following us or by subscribing to receive our updates via email. If you want to be featured yourself, then get in touch.