Creating a social marketing strategy

No matter how good your website is, if no-one know it’s there, it’s a complete waste of time. So it’s important you have a strategy in place to spread the word. Naturally you’ll be doing all the standard cross-referencing: including it on your business cards, packaging etc, but if you really want to reach out to new people you’ll eventually have to think about online marketing.

Unfortunately this can be a minefield. The landscape is evolving, with lots of players like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Myspace etc all vying for attention, and each varying in their relevance depending on the nature of your business. Where to start?

There are two things I’d suggest for ‘day one’: See what your competitors are doing: if they’re already doing this, you can at least match that, and then see what else you can do. And, regardless of them, I’d start with some mainstays of online marketing: write a blog, post links to it to Twitter, and build a Facebook fan page.

Don’t rush at it though: despite the apparently trivial nature of some of these platforms, your reputation hinges on every public posting you make. Choose your language carefully, don’t act on a whim. Think about how things will read in the cold light of day.

Plan for the long-term. Writing a blog requires commitment: far too many blogs are started, and abandoned forlornly a few days or weeks later.

neatComponents provides some key technologies to help you manage and integrate all this: you can create your blog within your site: no need for it to be on a separate blog site where blog traffic won’t benefit your business. And you can get the site to store up and publish your blog postings on a schedule. Create a batch of postings in one session, and leave it to manage itself for a week or two.

It also integrates automatically with Twitter, giving you a smooth way to drive traffic to your blog – and to your site. Again, this can be done to a pre-arranged schedule: so a Tweet can be sent out when your blog posting goes live, and a reminder Tweet can be sent out a few hours later, catching a separate audience.