Question: What Is The Goal of Business Growth Marketing?
Answer: Traffic and Conversion!
What this means is that in order to grow your business with new customers, there needs to be a stream of relevant traffic interested in what it is you offer. Your job is to move this traffic from interested to “I’ll Take It” !
Question: How do you move people from being interested to buyers?
Answer: In my experience, people become buyers when a relationship and trust is established. Also, for professional services and many physical products, people want to talk to a person before making a final decision. Contact information including an email address and phone number is very important.
Building A Relationship On Line
The process that has worked for me has at it’s foundation a blog. The blog has a contact capture form with a reason for people to give you that information. Their name goes into a autoresponder system for follow- up messages with value added content. Value added content can be tips, a link to another blog article, examples of what is working and direct educational material. Each follow on email should have a signature with a link for more information and contact information.
The blog is the home for valuable content or articles that offer valuable information. This can be current news and relevant “how to” information. Offering examples of what is working is another terrific way of offering value. Marketing messages can be in the signature and the article itself can be structured so the reader understands how your offer is a solution for their interests.
In summary, the blog and the autoresponder sequence is key to building trust and establishing a relationship. Links in the blog and emails can direct the reader to a direct sales page or a contact page.
With this foundation in place and continually growing, you now have the source of material for valuable updates using social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Social Media is a major tool for helping you build your business. I recommend you look at your social media network as an asset for your business that will continually become more valuable if it is properly managed.
I always recommend using at least two accounts, one personal and one business. Twitter seems to regularly modify how it is enforcing its terms of service. Having multiple accounts reduces the risk of going completely off of Twitter because of an account suspension. However, if you post quality messages to valuable content plus use tweets that have no URL in them that demonstrate you are interacting, they you should not have any problems with account suspension.
Building a Twitter following and managing tweets through that network can be a significant commitment of time. I highly recommend leveraging or outsourcing a lot of this work. My company New Digital Media, Inc. has been established specifically to help you with this.
There are three primary channels on Facebook that should be used that do not cost money. One channel is pay per click advertising does cost money. Regarding pay per click on Facebook, my initial tests are positive. It appears advertising on Facebook is cost effective. More on this in a future article.
The first area that should be built on Facebook is your profile. There are many exceptions to the rule that profiles are to be personal. Currently I do not advise spending time building a business profile as there is a high risk of being deactivated. Your personal profile can and should have clear links to your business.
My focus has been on building my profile and my friends list is primarily for business purposes. As I approached the 5,000 friends limit on Facebook I created a fan page. While I am not a fan of the label fan page, it is channel for expanding your network and there are no limits to the number of fans. If your goal is to build a fan page for a business (Facebook encourages business fan pages) then I recommend a build strategy that invites friends to a fan page, uses Twitter to promote your profile and fan page and test Facebook ads to build your fan page. I have seen very effective ad campaigns that have built fan pages fast so I know this works. If you build a fan page then you should have a communication strategy for developing the interest of your fans.
Facebook Groups are one of my favorites for building business since once a person joins your group, generally they are very interested in messages related to the topic of the group. For example, I have the group Build Business Profits on Facebook which ties into the theme of this blog as well as my social media blogs. The feedback I receive from messages sent to this group as well as several other targeted groups I have built is consistently positive.
Other Social Media Sites
I highly recommend using YouTube and I have done a lot of YouTube work in the past and will be stepping up my YouTube activity again this year. I also recommend LinkedIn There are many other social media sites and I have some work being done on a handful of other sites. However, with the growth in Facebook and Twitter I continue to concentrate on those two. Up and coming and closely being watched is Google Buzz.
The Number One Key Success Factor
While I am always building my social media network and the network for clients of New Digital Media, Inc. the most valuable asset in social media is the quality of information offered in articles and personal communication. With my own accounts and those of clients there is always a focus of adding value and blending with personal messages. I have no automated messages flowing through Facebook and I am paying increasing attention to the balance of non automated messages on Twitter.
Related
My focus is having people connect with me on my offers. This is what I always advise clients as well. Consistently there is contact information with articles, contact name and email forms feeding an autoresponder with an email message sequence and published phone information. This is fundamental internet marketing. There is always more including search engine optimization, search engine pay per click, squeeze pages and more. However with a consistent focus on building a relationship with people who are interested in your products and services, you will be able to stay focused on those on line tools most effective for your business.
Then there is off line marketing which is a topic for another article.
Steve Pohlit
Business Consulting, Executive Coach
Turnaround/Crisis Management
Temporary CEO, CFO, Controller Services
International Business Resources
Social Media Services
New Digital Media, Inc.
727-587-7871
About: Steve Pohlit is a CPA,MBA and has been the CFO of several major domestic and international companies. Steve is a business owner and an expert business consultant focused on building profits and net asset value. He is very experienced with Internet marketing and social media marketing. All articles published by Steve unless specifically restricted may be freely published with this resource information.
Hi Steve,
This is beautifully written! I really appreciate your clarity and step-by-step strategy.
It’s also very generous of you to share your process with others.
This is how Law of Attraction works, isn’t it? Give and receive 🙂
Blessings and Light,
Anita
Anita you are the poster child for giving and I am grateful for our connection.
Nicely done, Steve. I agree that its all about providing value and building relationships.
Some great information,keep up the good work
Hey Steve thanks for share.
Steve, Your job is to move this traffic from interested to “I’ll Take It !
You did it!!!
You are not broke, you have a seed. 🙂