Market Your Business While Pinning Your Interests

With a little creativity, Pinterest can be an excellent tool for small business marketing. The new social network focuses on pinning visual interests to virtual “boards” for display to those following you.

Your pins can either come from other online links, or uploaded straight off your computer. You can also like and repin someone else’s pin. The catch is that the new social network has come out discouraging pinners from self promotion of their own business or work.

There are still some ways to use this social network for small business marketing. Instead of blatantly advertising your business, try selling the lifestyle or message that your business is trying to convey.

If you own a gym, you can post pictures of healthy foods, or people working out. If you are a realtor, why not try posting area attractions, and things people can do in your city?

There’s lots of room for almost any business to try and sell people on the lifestyle your business is trying to promote. A marketing company can pin articles about new technologies that can help businesses.

Try following people who would be interested in your industry, and think outside the box.

Bright Idea: Your Marketing Materials Aren't About You

It’s time to stop talking about your business. That’s right. It’s not all about you. Even on your website. Your marketing materials offer you a chance to have a conversation with your customer. It’s not simply a one-way broadcast anymore.

Your marketing materials provide your customer a chance to realize that they are not alone. More people have the same type of problem that they have, and you offer a solution.

The sooner you can bring your customers to this realization without banging them over the head with a hard sell, the better you’ll be. You really should be more focused on providing the information your customers are looking for, than blatantly telling them what you offer. There is a difference.

Here are some questions to consider before beginning work on any marketing materials. What type of people want to buy what you sell? Who is your ideal customer? How does your product improve their quality of life?

Here’s an example. I’m an avid Starbucks customer. I absolutely love it. But I don’t go just for the coffee. The coffee is good, but it is not what makes me a regular. My wife and I live in a small apartment, and Starbucks gives me a change of scenery to get some work done.

They sell an experience. Their marketing materials go beyond selling a cup of coffee. There are pictures of the inside of their stores. They show the inside of their stores as a soothing and refreshing place to work, socialize, and enjoy their refreshments. The point is that it is about you. What do you need to do when you walk into a Starbucks store?

They also offer the ability to download music, books and various apps when you link up to their WiFi. It’s all part of the experience because they know that their customers want more than just coffee.

My gym sells me more than a monthly membership. They sell me a healthy lifestyle. I work out in a small group environment where there is always an instructor to guide me. I can also ask them any general nutrition questions. They’ll guide me in the right direction as far as diet goes. They work to educate and empower me to become a healthier person.

They are also quick to add that about 80 percent of living a healthy lifestyle is done in the kitchen. They’re honest, and they help me to avoid complete junk food. It’s invaluable experience, not just a half an hour workout. Their social media, website, and internet marketing all reflects this reality.

You can create that experience in your marketing copy. No matter how materialistic our society, when it comes to marketing your business, an idea or concept will sell better than a product. Every time.

A locksmith doesn’t just sell keys. They sell security and safety. A restaurant doesn’t sell sandwiches. They sell a dining experience. A copywriter doesn’t sell words. They sell your business’s success.

What do you sell? Are your customers truly aware of the experience being offered?

Write Less

Mark Twain said it best, when he said that he'd write less if he had more time. Writing less is not always easy, because you have to make your words count.

In the day and age of Twitter, and abbreviated blog posts, people's attention spans are brief. If your message can be communicated in a shorter way, do it. If you need to still go long, make it worth it.

Write frequently, but shorter can be ok...

Market Smarter in 2012

So you made some resolutions to ramp up your marketing in 2012. Before you start aimlessly posting to your social media networks and taking shots in the dark, consider making a quality marketing plan for your business—something you’ll be able to stick to.
When you plan your approach, begin by thinking like your customer. What are the new and improved ways that they will be seeking out information in the new year? It’s always better to meet them where they are. Here are four easy things to keep in mind when you’re looking for ways to cultivate new relationships.

Mobile Marketing—By 2013, more than half of people accessing the internet will be doing so through mobile devices. Is your business ready? Do you have QR codes on your marketing material, and are you set up with location based social media websites? Your business will reap the rewards if you work hard to accommodate this type of customer.

Hit Record—Video will continue to be hot. Youtube is incredibly popular. No matter your business, consider doing an introductory video. Run down your services, and run it through a Youtube account. You don’t have to be a great actor or highly photogenic. Just be yourself. If you tag it well you could end up seeing some extra traffic.

Expand Your Presence—Businesses need to realize the true value of the social web, and a strong internet presence. It is no longer enough to simply have a website. There needs to be a solid plan for content distribution. This means blogging, and encouraging employees to do the same. Don’t be afraid to ask customers or clients for a review or testimonial. It’s time to cast a wide net, to see what the web can drag in.

Content Distribution—The need to blog is well known, but are you doing enough to get the word out afterwards? Here are some quick tips. Sign up for some directory links. These can introduce you to new traffic. Post it, Tweet it, put it up on LinkedIn. Do you belong to other social media sites that encourage you to write articles? Post it as an article. Don’t forget about Digg, Reddit, Stumble Upon and Delicious. You can email it too.

Falling Into The Time Suck

We all know that social media can be a massive time suck. You may power up the computer with strong intentions, to spend the afternoon scrolling through your newsfeed, finding out what your friends ate for lunch. Pretty soon the afternoon is gone. We’ve all been there.

When you are trying to build a business, this can be dangerous. The small things we need to be doing to build our network and improve our business all have a positive cumulative effect. Our minor distractions that take us away from these goals do not.

Here are a few suggestions for the things that you should be doing while on your social media accounts. They may not be earth shattering, but they all have a cumulative network-building effect.

So go ahead, and take back your productivity. Check a few things off your to-do list. And don’t worry about what your friends ate for lunch.

Write All About It

You can never go wrong spending your time creating original content. If you’re drawing a blank, industry news, opinions, and ideas all make for good blogs. If you’re still hard up, try book reviews, new product announcements, or piggy backing off an existing blog in your industry or community. There’s always something that you can be writing about.

Go Ahead, Be a Blabber Mouth

Whether it’s on your social media platforms or other blogs in your industry, spend some time commenting on others’ efforts. This goes a long way in getting your footprint out there. Most blog comment sections allow you to either link back to your website or Facebook account. Take the extra time to intelligently contribute to the conversation if you want someone to search you out.

Find and Post

The most successful Facebook and Google Plus statuses have links to articles, or photos. People want that image, and that extra content. Posting and Tweeting the best articles in your industry can be a great way to start a conversation and interact with others, which is what internet marketing is all about. Post an article and seek opinions. It’s a good way to interact.

What Are Your Recent Accomplishments?

Remember those social media platforms you created accounts for a few months back? Don’t forget to post. Don’t forget to contribute, and be a part of the community. Sure Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn get a lion share of the attention, but you can still catch fish in a smaller pond.

Talk to The Right People

Find a few people who are potential clients or colleagues in your industry and engage. The whole point here is to build relationships. You can mention them on Twitter or send them a quick LinkedIn or Facebook message.

Utilize Your G+ Profile

Earlier this week Google announced their plan to incorporate social search into their algorithms. The plan is called Social Plus Your World. What does this mean for businesses struggling to get their name out there?

Results from your social networks will also factor into your search.

You can’t ignore social. You need to be prominent on the social networks, and at least for right now, active on Google Plus. G+ profiles and pages are showing up high in the search rankings.

Photos, status updates, and other information from friends profiles will also be showing up in the results. While G+ may not have Facebook’s 700 million users, it offers a different advantage: the power to be found.

It will remain to be seen whether Facebook, Twitter or anyone else can prevent Google from tying their social media and search engine together. Until that’s stopped, you might want to beef up your G+ profile.

There’s some good visibility there.

Want More Business? Market to the 82 Percent

If you are hanging on to the idea that social media is not for your business, or that it will eventually go away, it is definitely time rethink your conservative stance on this issue.

The stragglers argue that if they do nothing, the entire phenomenon will go the way of Myspace. Social media and mobile marketing right now are stronger than ever. More and more people are using more advanced technologies to do their shopping and their research.

More data is coming out to show the staggering number of social media and mobile users. Website Magazine reported that social networking sites reach 82 percent of the world’s online population, and that they account for 19 percent of all time spent online.

Facebook still takes up a huge chunk of that time spent on social networks. No matter what type of business you run, it’s crucial to meet customers where they already are.

Don’t discount Twitter. The same Website Magazine report stated that Twitter reached one in 10 internet users around the world. It offers a great way to connect you with potential customers in a meaningful way.

It’s crucial to have a website, but social media platforms and a strong overall online presence is the way to drive more traffic to your site. This is done through traditional SEO, and an active social media plan.

If you have a brick and mortar location, give strong consideration to the mobile platforms that allow your customers to check in. These platforms are another great way to get your business name in front of their network.

These sites also do something else. They benefit the mobile customer. According to the same report, 32 percent of the total US mobile population reported accessing a social network site from their phone.

If you are looking to increase your customer base, marketing your business to the 82 percent of us is a good start. Social media and mobile marketing provide great ways to level the playing field between small and large businesses.

Building Trust

Trust Agents from Chris Brogan and Julien Smith is not a new book, but one that is still a must read for anyone slightly curious about social media and online marketing.

That’s the beauty of this creation. Because the authors focused so heavily on how to build networks, and why they are important, it is a timeless piece at a point where many books in this industry are out of date by the time they go to print.

This isn’t a book about the latest aspects of Facebook and Twitter. It’s not a technologically geeky book about aspects of social media platforms that were created yesterday.

It’s a book that proves once and for all that this new form of interaction is not going away, and if you’re looking to go anywhere in business, you need to be building relationships all the time, and meeting people where they are at—that means online.

How do you build relationships? How do you become an agent of trust? You build armies, reach out and interact with people, and become a human artist, according to the authors. You interact with people, and listen as much as you talk. After all, you need to be someone that people think of, when they have future projects.

Instead of focusing on sheer volume and treating the people in your social networks as a statistic, try interacting. Use mentions in Twitter to start conversations. Ask questions, post interesting content and build relationships.

If you somehow missed this book when it was released in the summer of 2009, go back and check it out. While this may seem like light years ago in the timeline of social media, this book is still a mandatory read for anyone interested in establishing online relationships.

Check Your Keywords For Stronger Internet Marketing

January is the time when a lot of businesses will be rethinking their marketing. It’s a time for fresh starts, and that goes for business as well. Keyword research is a crucial part of any strong internet marketing campaign.

Before you start writing blogs, posting, and tweeting about your business, do a little planning. What are the strong keywords that will benefit your business? What do you want to rank higher in the search engines for?

Don’t just guess. Make sure that you are using the same phrases that you want to be discovered with. Check them with Google’s keyword tool. This tool will tell you how many people are searching for a particular phrase and how many people are trying to rank with that very phrase (how competitive it is).

Make sure to include this in your plans. It can take a lot of time and effort to rank for keywords. So if you don’t have the right ones now, time is money. If you do this the right way the first time, it means more business sooner.

New Year, New Marketing

A goal without a plan is a dream. I wish I could take credit for that line, but I saw it on a client’s Facebook page.

My client runs a gym, and the phrase came as part of a fitness related graphic, but works well for business as well. Now is the time where people and business owners develop all sorts of resolutions in the New Year.

Maybe you are looking to increase sales, broaden your client base or expand your business in any number of ways. What you really want to do is get more specific with these plans.

If your goal is to make X amount of money, how many clients would that take? Where would you find these clients? You’ll need to ramp up your marketing efforts. Maybe you should be looking to increase the size of your Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook networks. At the same time, you should probably be reaching out to more people to develop new relationships within these networks.

It might mean taking a fresh look at your website copy, or developing a brochure that explains your services. Maybe you should be doing more with an email campaign.

It all depends on the goals that you have set for 2012 and what you hope to see accomplished. Do not be one of those people who fizzle out come February, however. Keep that plan strong, and take the steps that are necessary to make sure that your goals are more than just a dream.

If you need help with your marketing materials, contact me today!