1 hour Twitter engagement
2 – 30 minute visits to LinkedIn Answers
5 posts to Facebook, be sure these are content of value
1 You Tube video
6 Foursquare check-ins
3 Yelp reviews
10 insightful comments, divided among various platforms
a dash of ‘Likes’
Mix, modify to taste and repeat weekly
But no, I am only kidding here – there is no one recipe for online marketing success. I would love to be able to provide an exact recipe for you but honestly, the options are endless and the choice of platforms, tools and time spent is totally dependent on YOUR goals and YOUR clients’ and customers’ preferences.
While I can give you an idea of what tools are out there and train you on how to use them, one of the most important components of your plan needs to be your understanding of where your clients and customers are. Do they hang out on Facebook? Are they on LinkedIn? Are they active on mobile? Are they even online?
A colleague and I were discussing her business. Her ideal client is a person that is not yet comfortable online. She can teach them how to get onto the web, to check their email, do a Google search and to become aware of the various online tools that are available. Needless to say, her target audience probably will not find her via social media! Now, we could try to reach the children or grandchildren of these people, advertising services to them so they could purchase the services for their parents or grandparents but her ideal clients are, by definition, not yet online.
Other clients, with service businesses but no brick and mortar locations, may not be a good fit for Foursquare, Gowalla or any of the other geo-location tools out there, no matter how popular those tools may be. Someone with compliance concerns may not want to pursue Twitter. Just because a platform or tool is popular, with hundreds of thousands, or even millions of users, does not necessarily mean that it is right for YOU and YOUR business.
One very important component that many people forget to take into consideration is that the fit must be right for YOU as well! If you love to write, by all means, consider blogging or article marketing. If you practically live on Facebook and your clients are there as well, then that may be a great platform for you. Ditto on Twitter. But if you do not enjoy writing, then even if blogging or an e-news looks like a great idea given your client base and industry, it is probably NOT a good fit. And if it is not a good fit, it probably will not lead to online marketing success.
So, back to that recipe. Let’s modify it to be:
- a mix of platforms – so you offer your message in a variety of ways
- where your customers/ clients are already spending time and looking for information
- where you are comfortable participating and engaging.
If you need help understanding the options that are available, identifying where your clients/customers are and/or creating a plan that you are comfortable with, please give me a call at 212.664.1872 – together we can create a recipe that works for YOU.
