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Online marketing for small business has conventionally revolved around driving traffic to your sites where the visitor will be converted into a sale by well-written sales pages.
That even applies today, but in addition to all this, most businesses are starting to recognise the need to consider the influence of social media.
It is not time to abandon all the search engine optimisation (SEO) techniques that brought you the traffic first of all, as traffic is still king, but you must know what your customers are doing and where they are hanging out; the likelihood is that social media is playing an extremely great part in their lives thus social media marketing needs to be playing an incredibly great part in your online marketing techniques.
Small, local businesses must be interacting with their clients on Facebook, Twitter and Google+, as that’s where people are now spending their time. There are over 10 million different visitors to Facebook each and every month in Australia and the release of Google+ means that the world of social media is going to be open to many more people who have so far shunned utilising Facebook. It is also becoming more related to search.
As a sign of the growth of social media, Google+ took simply over 2 weeks to reach 10 million accounts – Facebook took around two years to reach this number.
Hand in hand with social media marketing comes online reputation supervision and management. These days everyone is a publisher of content – every time we enter a comment in our “status” on Facebook we are publishing content. That means that it is noticeable to many people and can have influence. Part of our online marketing technique must be developing a good influence towards our business’s products and services.
If customers are spending time on social networking sites it stands to explain that they will be commenting on things they like and don’t like, right?
That implies that your products and services might be under examination and, implying that our reputation can be blemished because of negative reviews from customers, misconceptions or situations where we did not act in response to the expectations of the customers if we fail to keep track of this and deal with the process.
The old adage of “the client’s always right” applies online too and it’s their perception of your business that counts, not yours!
That is why you must be understanding the online reputation monitoring tools that enable you to verify comments about your business or brand. These comprise of Google Alerts, Social Mention, Viral Heat, Google Reader, Yahoo Alert, Twitter Search, Technorati, BackType and BoardReader.
Expect more names to be cropping up in the area – a positive sign of its bearing and importance to your company.
As you can see, the conventional rules still have their relevance with small business online marketing, but looking into the impact of social media is vital to the continuing wellbeing of your business.
Join the new marketing revolution at Redcliffe Marketing and find out how to attract more local customers for your business. Get ideas on how to dramatically increase the effectiveness of even the smallest marketing budget. Visit http://www.RedcliffeMarketingLabs.com.au for more information.