Expanding your reach to get closer to your customers
About 100 years ago, restaurants mainly did one thing: provide meals. Diners came from all over to enjoy the restaurant’s atmosphere, get a break from home and taste something special. Then the restaurant industry figured out that not everyone wants to go out to eat. So what did they do? Offer delivery, take out and drive-thru services.
Now some restaurants only provide dine-in services. Some only do delivery. Some only do drive-thru. Most offer at least one option. You don’t expect a five-star restaurant to have drive-thru services because that’s not what its diners want.
In a similar fashion, 10 years ago, email stood alone. Sure, some businesses had websites, but they relied on email to nurture and grow their relationships. From there, they could compel prospects to visit their website.
How do we connect with prospects and clients today? Social networks. Websites. Emails. Mobile services. Which one should you do? With the right tools, you can do all of them without spending a lot of time distributing your information.
The story of one cool cat marketer
Let’s say a smart marketer has a successful services business and relies on email newsletters to freely share valuable information with his customers and to entice prospects to take an interest in his services. He also maintains a blog on his website, where he posts some of the stories from his newsletter. His blog has a newsletter sign-up box. And his newsletter points to his blog.
He signs up for accounts in Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn for himself. He learns how to use the social networks. Soon, he discovers his clients and prospects often use these social networks. The smart marketer begins having conversations with them, which gives him more insight into what people need and want from his services. He also watches for conversations that mention his company and joins in to help the best he can because he believes in strong customer service and solving problems that customers mention.
So he revises his profiles to better represent his business. Although people tend to use Facebook to connect on a personal level, many businesses find Facebook beneficial to set up a Page or Group. So the smart marketer creates a Page for his business.
He comes up with the idea to add an icon for all three services on his blog and on his newsletter. This connects all of his information.
He doesn’t stop there. On his blog, he has a one-click icon that allows readers to tweet his blog entry or share it on Facebook or another service. His newsletter applies the same concept, allowing people to share his latest issue or a specific article with their social network connections. This feature works similar to forwarding a newsletter, except you share the information on a social network. Oh, and newsletter forwarding is still there. The newsletter also includes links to his company’s Twitter account, Facebook Page and LinkedIn Company Page.
How to be a cool cat
If you already have a newsletter, blog, website or some of everything, you’re halfway there. Assuming you haven’t used social networks, or at least not much, your next steps are as follows:
- Sign up for accounts on two or three social networks. (Don’t overwhelm yourself trying to do a bunch.)
- Create and modify your profile to reflect your company and brand.
- Link to your social network pages from your website, newsletter and blog.
- Add features to your newsletter and web content that allow people to share articles or posts with social networks. The how depends on your set up. A web developer can help here.
What does it mean to be a smart marketer?
Email newsletters only go out to readers when you distribute them, but you can stay connected with folks in Twitter every day and extend the life of your newsletter by linking to it in Twitter. Twitter offers short interactive conversations. And, when companies need your services, you’re in their minds because you pop up on Twitter to remind them you’re ready and willing to serve them.
Clients can also check out your tweets to others and your status updates in services like LinkedIn to see how you think and represent your business. Since you can feed your blog into LinkedIn and other social networks, people can see your updates and again, be reminded of your business.
Many Twitter users may meet others on Twitter, but take that connection another step outside of Twitter. Rather than conduct your business entirely in Twitter, introduce yourselves and get to know each other.
As you use these services and share content, go in with the attitude that you want to offer your patrons more than just one option. This allows you to reach them anywhere and share valuable information without expecting anything in return. Do this, and you’ll reap many rewards from social networking.
If you’re in need of an email marketing application that can automatically connect and track your email campaigns to your Facebook Page, then check out our TailoredMail Facebook Publisher application. We also offer social integration features enabling clients to automatically publish broadcasts/articles to social networks and track activity. Contact TailoredMail if you’re interested in learning more!
