Social Networking will Market Your Business

Posted on May 28, 2013 by SilverCap

Social Networking to Market Your Business

If you are in business and want to be successful, then you cannot afford to ignore social networking via social media. With more and more people engaging in social media everyday, it is vital that you create, and be active on, accounts for your business. Properly run social media accounts can capture the attention of the people and businesses looking for your services on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ and so forth, and bring those people to your website. More qualified traffic to your website! Who doesn’t want that?

Not convinced that social media can help your business? Here are a few statistics:

27% of total U.S. internet time and 15% of total U.S. mobile internet time is spent on social networking sites. (Experian)
Approximately 46% of online users count on social media when making a purchase decision. (Nielsen)
Companies that generate over 1000 Facebook Likes also receive nearly 1400 website visitors a day. (Hubspot)
Twitter has 288 million monthly active users. (Global Web Index Study)
Facebook has 665 million daily active users and 751 million mobile users every month. (Global Web Index Study)
Google+ has 359 million active users monthly. (Global Web Index Study)

You May be Surprised at Who’s Using Social Networking

There are hundreds of millions of people logged on to social networks daily and they are not all under 30 as is a common misconception. In fact, the fastest growing demographic on Facebook and Google+ is with people between the ages of 45 and 54. Facebook has grown 46% and Google+ 56%, according to a Global Web Index Study. The same study shows that Twitter is currently the fastest growing social network showing 44% growth from June 2012 to March 2013. The fastest growing demographic on Twitter you ask? 55 to 64-year-olds with a 79% increase in active users over the same time period.

Social Networking is growing and expanding over all age demographics, which means that your target market is undoubtedly actively engaged on a social network. They are searching for information on products and services that you could be providing for them. You can start by looking at the statistics and finding the social network most likely to contain the target market that uses your product. Start posting relevant, informative content and show your readers that you are an expert and are the natural choice. Social networking provides such a massive marketing opportunity. Where else can you pour out your knowledge, ideas, and personality to your target market?

What’s Your Best Plan of Attack?

Using social media to market your business is time consuming, but the potential ROI is too big to ignore. If you have the time and desire to do it yourself then great, go for it and have fun! If not, you may want to budget for hiring someone in-house. You never know, you may have a someone on your team who is an active blogger. If this is the case, count your blessings and change their job description. If you do not have someone like this on your team yet you understand that you need to get on the social networking train, but you don’t have the time then you may want to consider hiring a firm that specializes in online marketing – including social media. I bet you could find one entirely suitable on a social network! 😉

As always your comments and opinions are valued and desired.

Colin is the Social Media and Content Marketing guru at OTR Web Solutions a web development & content marketing company since 2000, with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

5 Steps to an Iconic Web Presence: STEP BY STEP!

Posted on May 23, 2013 by SilverCap

Iconic Web Presence

“STEP 1: We can have lots of fun!

STEP 2: There’s so much we can do!

STEP 3: It’s just you and me!

STEP 4: I can give you more!

STEP 5: Don’t you know that the time is right!

HOOWOAH!!” – New Kids on the Block

Did I really just quote NKOTB in a blog post to do with creating a solid web presence and content marketing? Wow, that just happened. I guess it is fitting. The New Kids did an amazing job of knowing their buyer personas and then delivering what they wanted. They generated significant amount revenue off 10-18 year old screaming girls with catchy, sappy songs. They were effective and as it turns out they were also onto something with their song Step by Step.

STEP 1: We Can Have Lots of Fun with Our Web Design

When designing your website the number one rule is keep it simple, don’t over complicate the design. The design needs to reflect your company culture. This is where you make your first impression! Use colors that work together and are pleasing to the eye. The last thing we want to do is offend viewers with a rainbow of colors! Unless you are selling headache medication I wouldn’t recommend loud, bright and contrasting. The design and color scheme are the frame to the content. Your content deserves to be treated with respect as do the visitors to your web site. There is an exception to this rule and that would be with your CTAs (Call to Action). The visitors’ eye should be drawn to the CTA on the page. Remember, drawn not offended by! A good rule of thumb is to make your CTA in a color that is found nowhere else on the page, again without being offensive. The eye should be drawn to the CTA in a, “Oh, what’s this?” manner. The key to an iconic web presence is to have fun with the design process whether that means you are having fun doing it in house or having fun working with a professional web design team. It’s your online presence! Have fun with it, make it yours and make sure it appeals to the masses.

STEP 2: There’s So Much We Can Do

Once your website is built the possibilities are wide and varied. Consider your product and/or service and then you can properly select the add-ons for your site. You may need an online store to sell a line of products, or a blog to educate the public about your industry. You may consider one or more types of social media to help bring traffic to your site – CTAs, Landing Pages, videos, and/or webinars. There are so many ways you can make your website unique. It can be overwhelming! When considering the possibilities it is important to consider a few things.

Which add-ons will best suit my business?
How much time can I invest into my site?
How much money can I invest?
Can I hire someone to run my blog and social media?
Which social media am I comfortable with?

These are all important questions. Pick the add-ons that best suit the needs of your business. If you don’t have a line of products to sell then you don’t need an online store.

What you invest into your site whether it is time, money or both will play a major role I how effective your web site is. If you don’t have the time to invest into research, writing good content, and going over analytics to see where you can improve then I would suggest that you make sure you have a budget to hire professionals to crate your iconic web presence.

If you’re doing things yourself then select the social media you know and do it well! If you’re a tweeter then stick to twitter and do what you know. It’s better to do fewer things like a rockstar than do everything mediocre.

STEP 3: It’s Just You and Me

It is highly recommended that you have a blog on your website and that you post regularly and consistently. Writing posts of quality content regularly will, over time, establish a loyal audience. Another benefit to a blog is that every time you post you create more pages on your website which is good for the coveted organic page rank. More importantly a blog is a great way to nurture a relationship with your visitors. Establish buyer personas and then write your blog posts for them. Write as if you are having a conversation with them one on one. This is your opportunity to develop relationships and build trust with your readers.

A good quality blog will please both people and search engines. Your blog is the key ingredient to your iconic web presence.

STEP 4: I Can Give You More

It’s important to give more to visitors. This again, builds relationships and trust. Examples of what you can give to those that click on your CTAs is eBooks, webinars, white pages, samples and any number of other tools and services that you offer. By giving you will gain leads through landing pages and most importantly build trust. Why is trust important? Trust is important because when the consumer gets to the stage in the sales cycle where they are ready to make a buying decision, who are they most likely to make their purchase with? Most will go with the business they trust. It is my opinion that building trust is the most important element in the sales cycle. It does not come quickly or easily so take the time and have the patience to earn the trust of your visitors. Use your knowledge, personality and tools to earn trust over time and then reap the rewards.

STEP 5: Don’t you know that the Time is Right

Are you timid about getting online or about changing your current web presence?

Don’t be!

There is no single greater tool in marketing your business than a well thought out, solid web presence. If you have the budget, then hire professionals to work with and attack your online marketing strategy full strength. If that budget is not there at the moment then all hope is not lost. The beautiful thing about building or reinventing your online appearance is that you can do it a piece at a time. Nowhere is it written that it must all be done at once. Start with a blog and writing some fresh new content or update your design. Start making use of social media like Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. There are so many options. Pick one and do it well, then add another and so on. Remember it’s a marathon, not a sprint, but at the same time, the sooner you get started, the sooner your business will reap the rewards!

Silver ‘Re ‘ Cap

Create your iconic web presence STEP BY STEP! I know a lot of you just sang that! It’s alright, I’ve been doing it through the entire writing process.

Have fun creating an effective design that makes the first impression you want. Take your time and do it right. If you don’t have the skill-set required, admit it and hire a professional. You only have the opportunity to make one first impression, so make it a good one.
Consider all the different options to bring more traffic to your site. Blogging is highly recommended. Past that, do what you believe is best for your business and do it well.
Build a relationship with your target audience through well thought out personas and then delivering the content that they want.
Create CTAs and landing pages offering something of value.
Don’t wait, more and more people are making buying decisions online every hour of every day, get started and grab your piece of the pie!

As always your comments and opinions are valued and desired.

Colin is the Social Media and Content Marketing guru at OTR Web Solutions a web development & content marketing company since 2000, with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

Follow Colin on Twitter @CBSilvercap

Targeted Content: Lock On

Posted on May 21, 2013 by SilverCap

You’re on our way! You have started a blog and are posting regularly on topics that are relevant to your industry. You have upgraded your web presence to a responsive site. (Most people are using mobile devices these days to gain access to the web and will make buying decisions on their mobile devices). You did not want to miss the boat on that and have potential customers go with a competitor because of the lack of convenience with your web presence! You’ve got your “Calls to Action” and “Landing Pages”; you’re ready. But, ninety days go by and you are not seeing the results you expected. Why? The content is relevant to your industry which is great, but is that content being directed to the right person?

BUYER PERSONAS

We now need to create “Buyer Personas” and do so in an intentional manner. Buyer personas will help us write content that is more relevant to our specific clientèle – both current and future. We need to think of writing content the same way we would write a letter. The first thing we need to consider is: who are we writing to? It would be awfully difficult to write a good letter to someone when we don’t know the first thing about them!

WHO IS OUR IDEAL CUSTOMER?

Who are they? How old are they? Are they married? Single? What is their income? Are they workaholics? We can ask all sorts of questions to create our fictitious customers. The more we ask, the better. All the questions we ask ourselves will help us identify these personas. After we establish who they are, we need to name them and even give them a picture. This will help us identify with them. We will view them all as people and thus treat them as such. Now what do we do with these personas?

SURVEY OUR PERSONAS

Now we need to find people who are unbiased and fit our profiles. We need at least 20. The more we get, the better our results. We need to make sure we’ve prepared a list of open-ended questions to ask them. Once we’ve gathered all the data on all our personas, we can begin sorting through it and discovering what our target market needs.

CREATE TARGETED CONTENT

We know who it is we want to sell our product to and what it is that they want! We know who we are writing the letter to! Now we can make sure our content speaks to them and satisfies their needs. Now that we’ve locked onto their needs as a customer, they will be more likely to seek us out when they are in need of the products and services we provide … because we are building a relationship with them. We understand them. Who doesn’t want to be understood?

SILVER ‘RE’ CAP

Who is our ideal client?
Are there several?
What are their needs?
Lock on and feed them targeted content.

Post comments and ask questions relative to your business and as a community we can provide input and improve together.

Colin is the Social Media and Content Marketing guru at OTR Web Solutions a web development & content marketing company since 2000, with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.

If you have not yet moved to a responsive web presence Read This Blog Post

Follow Colin on Twitter @CBSilverCap

Follow OTR Web on Twitter @otrweb

Like OTR Web on Facebook

OTR Web on Google+

Social Media Management – Get Amplified

Posted on May 16, 2013 by SilverCap

Social Media Management, the ever evolving field that sometime makes us want to run for the hills. It can be overwhelming, yet it is vital to our success on-line and as a business.To be successful, we need to not only be on-line, but we need to be effective on-line Some of us understand this and then build a static website and leave it at that. After some time we notice that we are not getting any traffic and get frustrated. Maybe we took the next step and started blogging because we heard that fresh content will help us be visible and keep people coming back to our site. Now we have a limited number of people visiting our site and reading our blog posts. This is good! The problem is now that we’ve hit a plateau in the number of visitors we get and we are not gaining the business we’ve hoped to. Understanding this we then may ask, “How can we be even more visible on-line ” This is the question we ask because we want to get the biggest return on investment we possibly can on our web presence. Enter social media! In this post we will explore three social media outlets and get amplified:

Twitter

Let’s think of Twitter as a front page headline on what is going on with our business blog. We have 140 characters to get our message across in a concise and intriguing manner. If we write an intriguing tweet that, of course, leads to valuable, relevant content, we will be re-tweeted and quoted by our followers. Then their followers will have the opportunity to re-tweet and so on. Twitter is where your posts have the opportunity to go viral! If we only have our blog and no twitter account then we will only have a limited number of ways to be found., but if we then tweet with a link to our blog our exposure grows exponentially.

Great Content + Twitter = More visitors

Of course we will need to convert these visitors to leads and then to customers, but we can’t very well make these conversions if they are not on our website to begin with! Social media can assist in this area as well. We can use another form of social media to put a face and personality on our business.

Facebook

Facebook is where we show our human side. We still can link to our content, and attract visitors to our web presence, but here we are not limited by 140 characters. Here we can post images. We can also post about events we are holding and introduce the world to our most important resource…. our people. Even today in the age where we can find anything from our smart phone on any number of responsive websites, we still want to know who is on the other end of the deal. We want to get a feel for them before we decide to do business with them. We can use Facebook to post about a charity we are sponsoring, a corporate event we held with our co-workers and business partners. We have an opportunity to show our ‘face’. As consumers, are we more likely to do business with an email or with a business we can identify with on a human level?

Great Content + Facebook = Human Connection

Google+

Google+ is an interesting case. It does not have the following that Twitter and Facebook have. What it does have that the Twitter and Facebook do not have is a very intimate relationship with Google. When properly used, with appropriate keywords in our Google+ posts we can gain better page rank on Google. We need to be on Google+ and cultivate a following to multiply our exposure to the world through the Google search engine.

Great Content + (Google+) + Keywords = Google Love

The Silver ‘Re’ Cap

Twitter – Get viral! Get the exposure your great content deserves.
Facebook – Show off your greatest resource, your people.
Google+ – Better page rank through Google love.

As always we value your comments, this blog exists for you!

Post comments and ask questions relative to your business and as a community we can provide input and improve together.

Colin is the Social Media and Content Marketing guru at OTR Web Solutions a web development and content marketing company since 2000, with offices in Canada, USA, Europe and South America.