Social Media, Email and Content Marketing
There are a number of ways that you can proactively market to your potential customers online, which can both work on their own and in conjunction with your website. Generically this is called 'Content Marketing', and we tend to break this down into three main areas, Social Media, Email and Newsletters, and Articles or Blog Posts of content which addresses the relevant needs of potential customers who might be those interested in buying your business' offering.
Social Media Marketing
With more than a billion people regularly using social media, it is understandable that this area of the online world would be of interest to many businesses. Indeed, particularly if your products or services are B2C oriented, having a presence on the major platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter opens up another important avenue through which you can engage with your target audience. However, whilst social media may be very important if your business sells weight loss or kitchen products if you sell bar code readers it may be a little less obvious.
How a business engages with customers, on Facebook, for example, can also be very important. The wrong approach, the wrong content or 'voice', can equally put people off, and could potentially do some damage.
Also, each platform has a different audience, with different intentions and interests, so choosing the best platforms to focus your business on can be very important, particularly if you're short of time and/or budget. The bar code reader or commercial contract business might be entirely irrelevant to Facebook, but perfect for Linked In.
We have many years of experience and can help you first figure out what is right for your business, and then implement your strategy with the correct voice and appropriately engaging content. To find out more about our social media service click here or contact us for a discussion about what could be done for you.
Email and Newsletter Marketing
Marketing directly to customers or potential customers via email has been widely used, basically as the online equivalent of an offline leaflet or direct mail campaign. Email marketing can be very effective, or people can find it very annoying, and unless done well, considered as spam. A whole market has developed just to filter our unwanted promotional email campaigns, and to keep your email marketing from being seen as spam takes some thinking, some tech knowhow, and interesting content that engages people.
As for social media, how you do it, the voice that is used, and the way would-be customers are approached can make all the difference, keeping your emails from being junked and instead of leading to increasing interest in you, your products and brand, enhancing the brand's value. It can then lead to increased sales and potentially to a viral impact when the content is good enough that recipients forward it on to colleagues, their customers or the friends and family.
We can help you with every aspect of your email marketing, including writing the content, designing and building the templates, as well as sending it out and monitoring/reporting on the results. To find out more how we can help contact us today, or click here for more detail.
Article Marketing and Outreach Campaigns
Both social media and email marketing use content and its relevancy to potential customers to engage them with your brand and products. One of the forms that content can be delivered in is in the form of articles or blog posts either added to your website or to other websites. In fact, this form of 'article' marketing can also be carried in its own right completely separate to either social or email delivery methods. Good engaging content, on your website or someone else's site, is one of the reasons people visit websites, and importantly, return to them.
Placing good content on your or other sites can then be referred to via both social media and email campaigns, or, they can be distributed using a 'content outreach' campaign. This usually involves using a third-party service to advertise the new content by placing content 'snippets' around the internet on hundreds or thousands of participating sites, mostly working on a pay per click basis.
Like other forms of content marketing, using the right voice, targeting the right customer types with the right content, and then writing and preparing the content so it matches the expectations of those who might be interested in it, is part of what we can do to assist you. There are also spin-offs of SEO benefits (including 'Pillar marketing') that can be of significant benefit to your website.
To find out more contact us today and find out what we can do for you.