Your Marketing Home
All of the noise about social media marketing has only confused many business owners, who often ask us to explain why it’s relevant and whether they even need it. We tell them that to know the answer to that question, you have to “go home.” To your marketing home, that is.
Create a Place and Means for Customers to Visit
Picture your Marketing Home™ as your marketing infrastructure – the place you’d like to fill with friends who visit – hopefully again and again. There are many aspects to building an attractive, welcoming, and successful home:
- Branding, Collateral, Content. Your invitations and the tone you establish in your home must be on target to appeal to the people you want to invite over. This is your branding and your market positioning and messaging.
- Digital Presence. Your home should have an inviting yard and doorway that leads into the most important and used parts of the house – the common areas where your visitors can spend time with you.
- Analytics and Automation. The underlying foundation and basement contains the power, ductwork, and conveyances for making the house livable – your website content management system, analytics, customer and prospect databases.
- Owned and Earned Media. Your marketing infrastructure must also include the paths and roadways people will travel to get to you. These are your communications channels — your social media, publicity, or paid advertising media — which you’ll want to use wisely and in coordinated fashion:
Online search: Organic and paid methods for obtaining traffic to your site, and creating optimized content across your infrastructure so new people can readily discover you.
Email service: Using an online service for email helps you create effective communications that recipients are more likely to read and respond favorably to – use email only to send announcements and offers to the folks who already know about you and have asked you to keep them informed.
Relevant social media sites: Find out where your customers like to go for news and information. Then start building a presence there so you can listen to what’s of interest to your customers and prospects, learn what your competitors are up to, and promote new events and resources available at your house to a wide range of people.
Publicity channels: For getting news out and published by editors and bloggers.
Start Where You Are
It may not be possible to put all this infrastructure in place at once. If you haven’t the budget, the time, or the resource, start with the central component – a relevant, inviting website that you can easily update, supported with analytics for measuring people’s use, and with email capture connected to an email service so you can build your email database and begin basic communications. With even this much of your home built, you’re ready to move into active marketing. NEXT: Who We Are
