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How do you use blogs and social media to find ideal customers?
This is a question asked at the "Become the obvious choice for your ideal customer" roundtable
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4 Answers
We're a specialist marketing content consultancy with a very specific niche market. But the niche is hard to identify by SIC or other typical approach. Here is what's working for us:
1. We publish thought leadership content and blog about topics relevant to our target market (marketing and sales directors and CEOs in technology companies who target the financial services industry).
2. We publish the same blog posts in multiple places - forums that are targeted to the financial industry and that get more traffic than our blog.
3. We promote the posts via LinkedIn, Twitter, and specialized forums. We also occasionally email partial blog posts to our clients. (the most common place people find our blogs is on the industry sites and through my LinkedIn updates.)
4. We've recently been blogging about some of our projects, and those posts seem to be delivering the leads (the other posts create credibility). I've had people call after they read a post on a particular topic and ask for the same service.
Hope that helps. Here is a link to our blog to see the examples. http://www.propelgrowth.com/blog
The simplest answer is "it all depends." What kind of business do you have? What are the demographics of your key prospects and customers. What are your goals and objectives? There is no single answer...
You may want to check out Part 7 of the Social Media Primer, which provides a process for developing and implementing a social media strategy/plan. Here's a link: http://tiny.cc/SMinOrgsPrimer7.
Courtney Hunt
Founder, Social Media in Organizations (SMinOrgs) Community
Principal, Renaissance Strategic Solutions
Great question, Ivana.
Before social media, finding ideal customers required two major steps:
1- Know your target customer in two main areas
1.1 Narrow down your niche market in terms of education, age group, gender...etc.
1.2 Define what this market needs and offer it to them as products/services
2- Reach out for your ideal market and be visible to them.
With social media, point 1 and 2 are still very important. However, social media offered a 3rd step:
3- Let your ideal customer find you.
Step 1 must be done in all cases regardless of your marketing medium. Let's discuss how to intelligently follow steps 2 and 3 on social media:
2- Reaching clients:
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2.1 Traditional search: you can locate your target market by doing a simple search on Facebook, Twitter and so forth. You can also do a Google search on social sites. Let's say that your target market is stay-at-home moms. The following Google search will help you locate all the Twitter profiles that fit that criterion:
"intext:bio * stay-at-home mom" site:twitter.com"
2.2 After identifying your ideal customers, leverage social media to build relationships with them in a fun, non-intrusive way. Since the entire Garious team is Twitter-fanatic, we have dedicated an entire article discussing how to build relationships with your target customer on Twitter. I invite you to check it out:
5 Twitter Treasures that Only Insane Marketers Should Overlook! :
http://garious.com/blog/2011/06/5-twitter-treasures-that-only-insane-marketer...
When building relationships with potential customers on social media, it's important to respect the site's "tradition. For example, running funny contests on Facebook can be very effective but you need a more serious tone on LinkedIn and so on.
Needless to say, in order to decide your perfect "social playground", you must make sure that your target customer will be there. And you can know that by "ease dropping" and finding out everything you need to know about your prospects:
I recently answered the following question on Focus: "How do you monitor what people say about you on the web?” http://www.focus.com/questions/marketing/how-do-you-monitor-what-people-say-a...
3- Allowing your idea customers to find you:
Before social media, SEO and the (web in general) made this dream come true. All you need is to figure out the keywords your target market is using, include it on your site and they will search for you and find you.
Social media added the interactive ingredient to the mix. In other words, when you optimize your blog for search engines, people will easily find you but they will also comment on your post, giving a better chance to build relationships with them.
The same concept applies to having a killer Facebook page that shouts "Like me" and a great Twitter profile.
Speaking of Facebook pages, here are some great Facebook marketing tips:
http://garious.com/blog/2011/06/learn-intelligent-facebook-marketing-tips/
I hope you find these tips helpful. Good luck :)
Candyce's approach is terrific. I love the simplicity (and the multiplier principle!):
Step 1: Write relevant content.
Step 2: Get it out to as many places as you can.
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