If the Earth would be covered with water, humans would adapt. Then, if mountains would rise from the middle of the ocean humans would learn to go on foot and hunt and harvest and use the animal skins to keep them warm.
Why this introduction? Because this is the case right now. We started by sending letters in mail, calling people to present them our product and we end up now with all this social media around us and the inbound marketing techniques where you try to be in the eyes of who is looking for you.
This is my take on social media: it’s just a tool. The tool of the moment. The easiest way to market your business, to brand yourself, sell your product, interact with customers all over the world, offer better customer support. And is almost free. The cost is the time you spend building strong profiles that people will follow or friend with.
This is not easy. Think about it: you start a business and you dream in turn it into a brand. Your job is hard. You have to have good SEO to get organic traffic but you also have to learn how to use social networks to create awareness for your brand. You can’t just go create accounts and start posting: nothing will happen.
The best part is that there are no rules for a successful path. What worked for Gary Vaynerchuk may never work for you or me. The same thing we can say about many bloggers: I just like Gary for his charisma J. So, don’t be afraid to take a pen and a piece of paper or just open a .doc and start laying down your ideas on what to do in order to get people to learn about your business, how to identify your business with your brand, how to create awareness, how to create a viral campaign, how to interact, how to manage a crisis (when someone talks bad about your company or product).
Not only that this process will be a fun one but I guarantee that you’ll also realize some new things about your business as well. Here are some suggestions of things to consider. These few tips will help you decide how to interact, what to say and what social networks to choose for your marketing/branding:
1. Who are your clients: age, genre, nationality, religion, job, earnings, hobbies, where/how/when they spend their free time/vacation
2. What social networks to use: search on each social network before joining. See if that community has some interest in your niche and how big is that interest
3. What do you really sell: here is an article of mine that explains this concept in detail
4. What this people search on the Internet: search engines, social websites
5. What do you want people to do once they get on your blog and how do you plan to achieve it/how do you plan to make people stay on your blog
So, these are my ideas on the subject. Maybe you can help me by sharing yours in comments bellow.
Hi,
I agree with what you are saying but how to we attract large numbers of visitors to our site? We are passionate about what we are doing and our content is unique and has been well received – so what do I need to do differently? We are on Facebook and Twitter but I feel I’m missing something. Since we are a free resource we hope to encourage a sponsor or sponsors to help finance the site in the future but first we have to increase our visitor numbers. Any suggestions?
@Cynthia – traffic can be: organic (from search engines), payed traffic (PPC, banners, articles on other blogs about you), referral traffic (this is something you can do on social networks) and direct (this is happening mainly when you start developing a brand). The most important one is organic traffic. As a suggestion I would add unique title and description metatag to each page. Secondly you have to have a list of keywords to target. Content needs marketing but it also needs keywords. Send me an e-mail to bonciutoma@yahoo.com of you want to talk some more about this.