Marketing with Social Networks

Marketing with Social Networks

by | Website Design Journal

Of course, your website design is the most important feature of your marketing plan. Your website is the intended destination for all your customers, and it is where they decide whether nor not to buy from you. What is the second most important marketing venue. What are the options?

  1. Direct Mail | USPS Mail & Email Coupons and Invitations to past customers.
  2. Google Adwords | Buy Advertising Space on Google Search with Click Through Fees.
  3. FaceBook Advertising | Also with Click Through Fees.
  4. Social Networking | Creating Free Advertising by Networking with Friends and Associates.

Your past and present customers will always be your greatest resource for improving business. If you don’t have many customers yet, then it is time to reach out to your local community. If you don’t have one, then it is time to start building one. Bring your local community into your Social Network profiles as friends. Start with real friends. People need to connect on a human level, not digital only. But if someone is a friend of one of your real friends, you have a better chance to build trust and a new relationship.

Active Social Networking is Guerrilla Marketing. Your investment is time, the composition of well planned information, publishing to the network, and providing a good reason and a measurably result. Thanks to the internet, there are no barriers to global publication. The social network websites that are regarded as the most widely traveled and used in the USA are:

If you are wildly ambitious, or well funded, you will engage all 5 of these at once. If you are lean and practical, you will choose one to start and do a good job.

Everyone loves video. It has many applications. YouTube is a social networking venue. People collect videos and subscribe to your profile when they like you. You can communicate to them with comments and new videos. When you provide real entertainment or real information, people come back. They will learn what you sell. By setting goals of creating a series of interesting videos, you will be gathering valuable content to use on FaceBook and Google+. This exciting content will attract new people to join your network. The most advantageous creative content is video, usually accompanied by a title and synopsis in words. 

LinkedIn, Google+, FaceBook, Twitter, can all be managed in one tool such as HootSuite. In a different way, it can be managed from your website if it is built in WordPress with the right plugin. I is certainly important that you fuse your social networks with your website. They are all supposed to be supporting your website by bringing you more traffic.

Seriously, your present and past customers and friends are your most important social network. If you can’t reach them on FaceBook or YouTube, then find a way to reach them. You best goal should be to meet face to face or talk on the phone with happy customers and ask for referrals. This is basically all that you are doing on FaceBook with a growing collection of strangers. Let them get to know you. Send them video that you have collected on YouTube or Vimeo. Give them a personal touch. Just because they follow your FaceBook page, doesn’t mean you have met them and that you are friends yet. Make and effort to make friends. That is social networking.

 

 

Why is website design so important?

by | Website Design Journal

I have a client in Maine who provides tutoring services to student writers. There are many writing tutors in Maine. When new client prospects call, she has to sell them on why she is a better tutor than her competition. This is difficult to do on the phone. She offers references, lists her credentials, and tries to be good natured, but so do all her competitors, many of whom have equally impressive credentials. The other day, she told me “Every client who sees my website hires me.” They love what they see. It is a better website than her competitors. It conveys a positive attitude. It is very well organized. It answers all their questions. It offers Post articles from which the client can begin to learn immediately. Like it or not, believe it or not, these days, every new client will check out your website and that might be their first big impression of you and your service or product. They might even check it out initially on their tablet or phone. You can’t afford to fool around with amateur productions any more. If you do not have a state of the art website, there is a very good chance you are losing customers as we speak. Why would you do that?

Advertising is essential to success, and the most potent and common and important form of advertising in the year 2015 is your website. Yes, doing it right costs money. But when you buy tools to make your product the best it can be, then purchase bad quality advertising, you are not taking your effort or your business seriously. Website Marketing is just as important as the product. If you have ever taken a class or a seminar teaching you how to be a salesperson, you know that the most important moment in sales is “closing the deal.” The customers is looking for the right amount of information. When they have that, then they wait for you to suggest their next move, which should be to make an appointment. Your website design should be an organized tour through the most important information, decorated with excellent photography that gives the customer a good feeling, then it should offer them the next step and a way to take that step.

by Mark Saintonge of Portland Oregon

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