Growing your business today means growing your social status and gaining a large following. The best way to make this marketing strategy work is to attract more customers through your blog, video posts, and through social networks. Creating good content is an important investment in your business, which serves as your public relations representative. It helps to demonstrate to potential customers your capability to communicate clearly and competently, and also helps to achieve higher search engine rankings.
The key to high quality content for social marketing is the balance between self-promotion and something that is useful for your target audience that enhances their experience. In other words, the content should attract potential customers to your community.
Where to start
There are two types of content that you need on your website; we call them foundational content and community building content.
Foundational content is the permanent information on your website. Review your existing content, and if you want to attract people, the content has to be worth reading. Any content strategy has to link the goals of your service or product with the needs of your target audience. Your content should reflect the experience that you want to share, and highlight the fact that you understand your customers’ needs and you offer real value to them. Demonstrate the value you offer is worth their valuable time to read and to continue to follow you.
Real quality content builds a market following. If social marketing content seeks links, conversions, visitors, traffic, etc., and it is not focused on generating, motivating, structuring, or reinforcing demand, then it’s not content marketing. In addition to using SEO techniques, focus on competent and interesting to read posts, tweets, etc. It has to be completely focused on your customer and the value that you can provide or point them towards.
How to steps
The main focus of your community building social marketing strategy should be centered on the broader concerns of your target audience, and only indirectly on self-promotional gains. When unique, useful and easy to read content begins to attract traffic, the page itself should be adjusted with additional videos, details, social proof, customer testimonials, and even live chat. Over time you will be identified as an expert with credible knowledge about a product or service, and that will naturally and organically attract more people to follow you.
1) Find or create your Google Places page and do the following:
– Claim your business (link here to Claiming)
– Make sure Name, Address, Phone (NAP) are correct
– Add a description about your business and be sure to include the best relevant keywords
– Make certain to select the appropriate category and keyword tags
– Upload images and a video about your business
2) Submit your information to as many search portal directories as possible (Bing Local, Yahoo Local, Yelp, Yellowbot, Manta, Local.com, Internet Yellow Pages, Judy’s Book, Angie’s List, etc.)
3) Ask customers to leave reviews, send emails and have Quick Response Codes (QR) available to make it easy for happy customers to leave you reviews on your search portal directory pages like Google Places, Yelp, and others.
4) Create your social media pages on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc.
5) Perform page optimization by making sure your page titles include the city and primary category people search for, be sure any text reads well while including relative keywords and location in the text. Have an H1 header tag that includes the keywords and location best suited to your business. Insert a short meta tag description with keywords into the page HTML, along with unique page descriptions throughout the site, and include Geo tags with the GPS coordinates for your business.
6) Start a blog to keep content fresh. Make regular updates and content changes.
7) Create a separate mobile site, or a responsive website that recognizes when users are on the phone instead of their PC. Ideally include easy navigating buttons with directions and have a one-click phone number to auto dial.