strategy - Digital Grapevine

Ways to leverage Social Media to deliver more leads

Apr 022012

Social media has become an essential buzz word in marketing and a very important tool for brand awareness but how do you convert Twitter followers and Facebook fans into paying customers? It really depends on your brand and finding the right marketing mix for your brand and company are imperative if you wish to be successful in this area. Each brand will have different challenges which means that your strategy has to make sense for your brand.

Often times, people ask me what I charge for social media networking on behalf of a small business and every time, I have to say, “That depends”. This isn’t because I don’t know what my own rates are and there isn’t a value attached to what I do but rather because each brand is different and while one brand may get great engagement from 2 posts a week and basic management and monitoring, another brand may benefit more from more hands-on interaction with daily or even multiple daily posts on their social networking sites.

That said, there are some generic tips that can be used to increase your engagement and as a result turn fans and followers into brand ambassadors who will not only endorse your brand but will also be a paying customer.

1. Use Search to your advantage

With so many social media network messages sent out into cyberspace every day, there is plenty chance that your company or brand may being talked about without anyone using your handle or hashtag. It is important to be proactive when managing your company’s social media profile. If there are conversations going on, you can always join in, offer advice, answer questions and improve overall brand interaction with your potential customers.

You can also search according to your industry so you can be aware of what people are saying, what they do like and don’t like, which can help you with your marketing techniques for new product/service launches in the future.

Another way of searching is to search for your competitors, monitor who is interacting with them and communicate with those potential customers as well. Make your searches relevant to your business and services and approach potential customers with real human interactions and not just sales speak and you are bound to convert a couple of those users into real customers.

2. A Picture is worth 1000 words

Photos drive double the engagement that text posts do on Facebook so take some pics and connect with fans that way. You are marketing to your fans without annoying them because they are actively engaging with your post in a positive way. You can gain feedback, and the pics need not be product focussed. You could post literally anything and you will find that you will get more engagement as long as the picture can be identified with the brand in some way.

3. Give stuff away

Internet users LOVE to enter competitions, especially when there is a great prize to be won. It’s a great way to boost followers as well as engagement. Be careful about what you are offering so you can be sure you are attracting the right types of followers.

Build in actions that allow fans to share to their social networks, which will increase virality and stay true to your brand. Make sure the way in which you are running your contest fits with the platform you are using to run the contest on. So this will mean a change in the way you present the contest on each social media network. Make sure your prize attracts people from the same demographic of your target market and that your average customer will appreciate the prize.

4. Use Platforms Exclusively

Make sure your message is unique to each platform. You will gain more followers on each platform that way and you will be able to more easily promote your product to more people if you have a growing following of people.

If you have specific marketing messages or offers that you only offer on Facebook and nowhere else you are reinforcing your investment in the channel.

5. Get more Personal

If you speak to your customers in a personal way that builds the relationship and creates real brand loyalty, you have a higher chance of converting your fan into a paying customer. No one likes being the recipient of a mass message. It’s important to try to humanize your brand so people don’t feel like they are just a number.

Live chats are another great way to offer interaction and engagement with your fans. Also, ignoring negative comments is an absolute no-no. Rather address the complaint and you will be making use of an opportunity to convert an unhappy customer into a brand ambassador who has confidence that your company will take every opportunity to ensure quality service provision.

Like this article? Get more like this delivered in your inbox by subscribing to our mailing list.

How to … increase your Google Page Rank

Jan 102012

If you haven’t thought about how your business is performing online, how your Google Page Rank may be affecting your business, and you haven’t implemented a strategy in order to increase your visibility both physically and virtually, it’s time to realise that the world has gone digital. You may have your regular customers who appreciate your personal conversations when they come into your store but at 10 at night those same customers may be browsing online and you could be instilling even stronger brand loyalty during that time.

Google page rank is vital to a business’s success and search engine optimisation is a necessary part of marketing but it doesn’t have to be complicated or difficult. We’ve put together a couple of pointers below to see you on your way to getting your Google page rank higher.

1. Create Timeless Content

Your content should be high quality, authoritative content which highlights you name and various keywords and phrases that you wish to show up in the search engines. Your content should be timeless, in other words, continually useful, not trending news that will be of no use to anyone in a few days. Make sure your content will be useful for the foreseeable future and you will continue getting links back to your content for the foreseeable future.

2. Use Directory listings and online profiles to your advantage

If you have your company listed somewhere, make sure you update your profiles and that these profiles link back to your website. Incoming links may not weigh much in authority but when you are getting many hits from more than one profile, this does add up.

3. Guest Post

Consider guest posting on relevant blogs. Blogs love fresh content and you can build links and therefore boost your rankings on Google.

4. Don’t underestimate video blogging

Video really is huge as it gives your company a personality and can also be spread across networks, all while it is linking back to your website. Create informative videos which people can share and watch repetitively. Since good videos tend to be viral in nature, Google will love the links, meaning your page rank will likely improve.

5. Get authoritative sites to link to you

If you can get websites that have authority to link to your website, this gives you a higher Google ranking. So, for example, colleges and universities are one type of site that has authority with Google. Get some of these to link to your site and you will be able to improve your page ranking.

6. Keep your website fresh

The more you update your website, the more important your website looks. Publish fresh content every day and you will become an important source of information. You have an opportunity with each and every blog post to rank for new search terms.

7. Choose relevant Keywords

Tag your articles and optimise each and every blog post for SEO. Make sure your headings are descriptive as well as eye-catching. Choose keywords that people will look for. Use analysis tools to see what people have searched for in order to land on your website and use these more frequently.

8. Don’t use Flash

Flash may look well, flashy, but it doesn’t do anything for your Google page rank. Change your flash website to a platform that is search engine friendly, such as WordPress or something similar, and your search engine rankings will improve significantly.

Like this article? Get more like this delivered in your inbox by subscribing to our mailing list:

Get the attention back on your small business

Jan 042012

After the manic high of the festive season, you need to get attention back on your small business since cash always runs low this time of year and everyone is clamouring for whatever last bit of budget their target markets possess. You need to capture the market attention now, while you can.

How do you do this, you ask? Well, here are just a few suggestions to get you on your way for the New Year:

1. Create a New and Unique Campaign

You need to be the first voice to be heard as far as campaigns go. It’s all about owning the keywords and instead of climbing on the train after it’s already left the station, you need to be the one up front. Think of some unique ideas surrounding Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day, and whatever other hypes there may be that your products could offer value to in your industry. If you can plan your strategy in advance, you brand will gain ownership on the web.

2. Keep it relevant

More and more, consumers are making their own choices. If you keep consumers’ desires and needs central to your marketing, you will be able to dominate. Tune in to the content that engages your audience and keep your marketing messages relevant to what they watch and read to gain more favour with them. If your content isn’t relevant, they simply won’t read it and will lose interest in your product or brand.

3. Keep it in context

When advertising, take specific note of where your advertising will be placed. A good message in the wrong place is often lost. If you are advertising computer software, a website such as the SPCA’s or the like will probably not be the best forum. Good content needs to be within the context of the page. The best advertising will be dynamic, provide useful information and engage customers at their level.

4. Analyse Consumer Behaviour

At the end of the day, while traditional marketing doesn’t allow for “counting clicks”, most marketers know that it works. Marketers need to look closely at consumer behaviour to ensure that their campaigns are engaging their target market. Quality content will drive results and analysing the behaviour of our target markets will give a clearer view of reader engagement and retention.

5. Analyse Competitor Campaigns

In order to stay ahead within your industry, look at what your competitors are doing and take note of what works for them. Remember they may have a share of the market and what works for them may not necessarily work for you but you can learn from their successes and failures. You can also easily see gaps in the market which you could use to your advantage to boost your revenue.

I hope some of these suggestions help in your new marketing initiative for 2012. Keep on swimming!

6 Ways Social Media may affect your business in 2012

Jan 032012

If you haven’t yet incorporated social media marketing into your marketing mix, take a look at the below ways in which social media could affect your business in 2012 and consider implementing social media marketing into your marketing campaign.

#1 Businesses consolidate traditional marketing approaches with social media activities

Marketers may have been confused at the how and why of social media at its introduction but smart marketers will have worked out by now that traditional marketing (such as email marketing) and social media marketing are not mutually exclusive. The different platforms complement one another in order to drive traffic and leads to your door. Marketers will realise that it is important to interact with customers where they are, so increasing the number of your tools can only benefit your campaign. Marketing integration of the traditional marketing as well as the newer social media marketing will be interwoven to create a solid marketing plan.

#2 Strategy becomes more important in social media

Businesses will gain a new understanding of social media marketing and will start to implement social into their marketing mix strategically. It is a device to drive leads into the business and businesses will start to treat it as such.

#3 Businesses outsource unique content creation

Content creation within social media marketing is absolutely imperative and as business realise that their marketing teams don’t necessarily have time to create content with their heavy schedules, marketers will find a sustainable model for creating unique content, which may include outsourcing. If a company or brand is not creating unique content on a regular and consistent basis, it will not stand out above the rest and will not gain the attention it is looking for.

#4 Businesses become choosy about social networks

Social media will be more focussed so that businesses communicate and network on social platforms that are relevant to their business and where their customers are reachable. Instead of being spread thinly across 5 or 6 platforms, companies will attempt to dominate specific platforms within their industry. Businesses will need to focus their attention on the platforms on which they see results, and this may not necessarily be Facebook or Twitter.

#5 Marketers embrace mobile

As smartphones and tablets become more popular, most consumers will be interacting with the internet this way. Marketers will soon realise that mobile is essential and will integrate it into their social media campaigns.

#6 Increase in media specialists

In 2011, businesses dealt with social media marketing by using people within companies who were expected to have expertise in social media. In 2012, we will see that the position of social marketer within companies will be solidified and that content marketers will have to start working rapidly within the expanding technology field. A social media specialist will have to be able to blog, market, work on many different platforms, be able to work within the tech sphere and perform high-level SEO tasks. In addition to this, jobs such as these will become more demanding and competitive. It would be short-sighted for businesses to not consider the benefits of having a social media specialist on their marketing team.

How Custom Facebook Tabs can increase engagement

Dec 122011

This year, Facebook introduced iFrames and with it the ability to build Custom Facebook Tabs. Custom tabs are a great opportunity for brands to engage more with potential fans as well as existing fans.

The fact is, if you build the right type of tab, you can increase your Likes and achieve some major growth. Just putting any tab up will certainly not work. There needs to be a certain amount of thought that goes into the process in order to significantly increase engagement.

1. Who are you marketing to?

If you understand who you are marketing to you can build a tab which will increase Likes and engagement. Tabs that are relevant to their audience mean that the content is on point and will encourage rich engagement. Social media eliminates the middle man and each company can target and communicate with its customer base directly.

2. What do you want to achieve?

There are many possibilities and outcomes that can be achieved through using custom tabs. It isn’t necessarily wise to have just one goal per tab. Brands should have a strategy for each tab and consider which audience to target and what action is expected. Be specific as to what you expect to achieve. A worthy goal would be, for example, to deliver personalised content, build brand awareness and increase.

3. What do want your tab to look like?

While building your tab, you need to look at the features of your tab. You need fresh content, a rich experience and a hook – something that will get your potential users’ attention. The best tabs will have a hook that requires people to come back to their page regularly and give fresh content on each visit.

4. What do you do now?

With a clear strategy set out, you should be able to handle multiple tabs. If you are running multiple tabs simultaneously requiring different actions, be careful not to overwhelm your user. Each tab should be labelled clearly.

5. What strategy do you have to direct people to your tab?

When tabs are not fully supported, the entire strategy can fail. It needs to be supported by a marketing plan ie. Facebook Ads, sponsored stories, wall posts, email blasts, newsletters, and share buttons. As traffic to the page increases, so will Likes and engagement.

As Facebook and Social Media Marketing are becoming more and more popular, it is important for your brand to stand out from the crowd and provide valuable content, no matter the size of your organization, the industry you are in or the age of the business itself. Using Social Media to build a community that understands and advocates for your brand is the ultimate goal.

10 Tips to Better Your Content Marketing

Dec 052011

Content Marketing can be a cost-effective and easy strategy to develop awareness and loyalty to your brand, but it can be extremely time-consuming. It is, however, worth the effort.

Here are 10 tips that can improve your content marketing and drive awareness about your product or service.

1. Determine Goals

Be clear on what your goals are and make sure your marketing plan will help you to accomplish these goals. These things need to be thought of before you can determine what type of content you will produce. You can tailor your content marketing plan accordingly. Each goal you set should be measurable and have a deadline by which you perform this measurement.

2. Identify your target market

If you don’t know who you are targeting you will not know once you have reached them, which means you will not know which marketing efforts have paid off. You need to research your target market and figure out what interests your audience. Pretend you are writing for one specific person and try to tune into his thought process. Listen to what your audience wants, and try to use this to get him to be more receptive to your content.

3. Create specific messages

Work out what will differentiate you and your product from your competitor and what will help you to achieve the goals you’ve set. There should be one to three main messages, with sub-messages that offer more detail. Using this strategy will allow you to direct specific messages to different segments of your target market meaning they will receive the right messages at the right time.

4. Define Content Marketing Strategies

There are long-form, short-form and conversation type content marketing strategies. Long-form strategies will include blog posts, articles and press releases. Short-form includes tweets & status updates & graphics. Conversations include participating in and creating conversations through blog commenting, link sharing and comments on videos. Theys helps to encourage discussion amongst thought leaders in the industry.

5. Create a Calendar

A plan is very important in content marketing but things can always change. If you have a calendar which includes strategies, specific tactics and responsibilities, you’ll save time in the long run.

6. Create Content

You have to create the content you are going to use in your content marketing plan. It has to be unique and it has to be different. Look at what your key messages are and try to incorporate these into your content without overly selling the product. You need to create trust by providing information and leaving traditional sales tactics for face to face situations.

7. Relationship Management

At the end of the day, the art of sales comes down to building a relationship with someone and convincing them to buy your product. In content marketing, you need to build relationships with your target audience. You need to share and comment on their content too so that you can establish your own communities across social networking platforms. You should be giving more than you are receiving.

8. Generate a Buzz

Make sure you use the right keywords and tags so that you can generate traffic through your blog posts. Spread the word through Twitter, Facebook, Newsletters, etc. but don’t force your content. If people think you are trying too hard, they may not be interested in what you have to say.

9. Measure your efforts

By measuring your efforts, you can determine whether your plan needs to be altered or not and whether it is, in fact, working. Keep an eye on pageviews, retweets, likes, +1’s, shares and so on. If your audience can take action, you need to keep an eye on it.

10. Rewrite your plan

Pay attention to your results and if something isn’t working, change your strategy. One goal needs to be that people recognise your product based off of the content you have been placing online and off.

Business Blogging: Is it necessary?

Nov 292011

In business today, your online presence can be the make or break element of your company. A large portion of lead generation comes from online searches. This is simply fact.

When customers are looking for a product or a service, most likely, they are going to look for it first online – even if it is just to read up on it. Google ranks the results according to the site’s locality, web traffic and optimisation on the site. If the information is valuable and rich in content, the site will be ranked higher up.

Knowing this should give you some ideas to market yourself and ensure that you can draw people in to a positive and quality online experience. In order to gain attention from people and engage with them, a blog is one of the most effective ways in order to give information about your company as well as allowing you company’s corporate personality to be displayed. Once you reach people, people will become responsive and start to connect with your business.

People enjoy learning about the product or service they are looking to buy or use so that they can make informed decisions. If you are honest and trustworthy, you will be able to establish yourself in the market as a trusted brand.

The best way to make sure your blog is well read is to connect a blog platform to your website, if you haven’t already done so. One of the pages of your website should be dedicated to new articles which are posted regularly with interesting content. You are effectively creating your own publicity. While traditional media are still an integral part of your marketing strategy, blogging should definitely be implemented into your marketing mix.

Here are 10 important points to bear in mind when setting up your blog to be an information source for your customers:

Write well – or get someone else who can write well to do it for you. No one wants to read badly written copy.
Use On-Site SEO – titles and keywords along with heading tags will go a long way in order to ensure that your content remains readable.
Tagging – Organise your posts with tags so that related posts can be found easily.
Feed Subscription – Use RSS feeds and email newsletters every time you post an article.
Keep control of your comments – you will receive plenty spam in between real comments, so manage these carefully and respond to real people.
Include links – anchor links with relevant and compelling titles.
Use social sharing – make sure each post has an option to be shared via various social networks.
Link to your social networks – use widgets to show your Facebook and Twitter stream with an option to join the network.
Market your blog – post links in related forums but only when it is relevant so that you add value to potential customers.
Be creative – you don’t have to stick with the boring name of blog. You can call it anything you wish, especially if you have a specific image you wish to portray.

Company Pages: Which Platform works best for Business Marketing?

Nov 242011

With all the different social media platforms available for business marketing, it may seem as if there are not enough hours in the day to keep up with all the different pages. So how do you decide which social media platform is the right fit for your business?

Here are some things to consider before deciding on which platform to use:

1. Where do your ideal customers meet in social media space?

Generally, LinkedIn can be taken as a strictly Business to Business platform, whereas Facebook is for Business to Consumers or individuals who are sole proprietors or small business owners. Since Google+ is so young, time will have to tell. The other thing to bear in mind is that we all have our favourites as far as social media goes and while your customers may have an account with one of the platforms, it doesn’t mean they are even looking for your content when on the site.

2. What value can you offer on which platform?

You have to be creating compelling content to hold your potential customers’ attention. You have to provide reasons as to why your page should be visited more than once. One way to approach creating content is to provide a resource on your field which will attract customers who need the information which will add brand credibility to your company.

3. What action do you want customers to take once they are on your company page?

Many companies have no clear purpose for their social media pages. Are you simply increasing brand awareness or is your purpose to generate leads. These strategies will have vast differences as to how you would design your page and content. If you want to generate leads, you need to lead the conversation back to your products and provide incentive for customers to get your products off of your social media platform. You can work towards getting their email addresses and converting them to paying customers.

4. How will social media integrate into your current marketing strategy?

Many companies think they are missing out on an opportunity if they don’t have a page on every single social media site but this isn’t necessarily the case. You should be in from of your customers wherever possible but being in more than one place doesn’t necessarily mean you are going to get more leads. Having a more meaningful presence on a lesser amount of social media platforms is better than having a shallow presence on many. So make sure you aren’t spreading yourself too thin. If you have something successful moving forward, don’t commit to another social media business page unless it fits your model and you can really dedicate the right amount of time to it.

5. What tools are you going to use to manage social media?

Social media management tools are more important these days and you need to make sure you know how you are going to update your content, reply to posts and interact with your customers. There are many great tools available, not all of them appropriate. Hootsuite is great but doesn’t support Google+ pages in their iPhone app. How much time are you wasting due to tools not supporting all your social media platforms?

6. Who will manage your social media platforms?

This is a big question and needs answering. While it doesn’t necessarily have to be you, someone has to do it. If you don’t have the time, you could hire someone. You can outsource to a company or you could hire a virtual assistant. If you do plan to manage it yourself, you would need to semi-automate processes with an alert tool. The thing with social media is that it can never be fully automated because of the fact that the human element is so important. Alerts, however, can be automated so that you know when there is a post for you to respond to. If you are looking for an alert method that won’t cost any money, you can set up a filter in your email that puts all your Facebook, LinkedIn, or Google+ notifications in a folder. However, bear in mind that with Facebook sending fewer messages, you may not get notification emails regularly enough to respond timeously.

How to Sell With Social Media

Nov 092011

We are all in agreement that Social Media is the next big marketing effort. But is it working for you? Or are you left wondering whether you are just spending a lot of money on a dead end toy? The truth is, social media success is often hit and miss. Some companies generate leads and business from social activity while other companies waste resources on blogs that don’t get read and tweets that aren’t answered.

It is important to make sure your marketing strategy is clear as it’s easy to lose your way with Social media. You need to make sure that you have the essential components for a valid marketing campaign:

Attraction: Attract qualified leads to your website or business
Interaction: Stay in contact with people after they’ve left your website or store
Conversion: Get people to “buy now” or move further down the sales funnel
Measurement: Determine whether your campaign is working

#1: Attraction: Draw people in

Using social media to attract qualified leads means making sure you have a content strategy. This means talking to people about what they are interested in. You may need to be more active on Facebook or a different social media platform, depending on where your customer base talks. If they are not able to access social media platforms during the work day, you will need to create blog posts or videos that give them solutions.

Ensure that your profiles are always branded. Look at different channels like YouTube. You need to establish credibility and create a brand experience that will help build trust with your audience. You don’t necessarily have to be on every social network but if you are on a few of them, make sure you are regularly active on them and consistent with your content. One update every few months is not a social media presence.

Make sure your posts link back to your site without pushing a hard sell. You want to interact with your customers, not make them feel like they are being actively marketed to.

#2: Interaction: Keep people coming back

The important thing to note here is that your competitor will always be vying for your business so you need to make sure that you are market-related and that you offering that little bit extra. You need to stay in the top off your customers mind and keep communication lines open. People have left Facebook pages due to admins not answering questions quickly enough so it is important to have someone monitoring your page at all times.

Traditionally, email marketing was the favoured tool of internet marketing as it drove customers to your website. Today, we have links to Facebook, Twitter and any other number of social networking sites on our home pages which goes against everything marketing normally teaches us. You aren’t supposed to send your customers elsewhere once you have their attention…But sending them to those sites means that we get to continue engaging with them on a different level. It affords us the opportunity to interact with them and understand them better by listening to their needs and offering solutions to their problems.

Also, one needs to keep in mind that the quickest way to be unfollowed, unsubscrived or unliked is to annoy, irritate, hard sell or fail to provide value. At some point, your customer is going to clean out his Facebook page, Twitter account etc. and if you aren’t saying something valuable, you will be thrown out with the trash.

#3: Conversion: Turning likes into buys

Hubspot recently released a report “State of Inbound Marketing” which showed that companies that blog more have more consistent sales. Social media has clearly made the biggest gain in lead generation.

Buys are a natural by-product of social media activity and those that have interacted with your business on this social level are more likely to contact you than an average site visitor.

#4: Measurement: Looking at the results

Many companies are concerned that social media lacks value and accountability due to the inability to track results. However, Google Analytics gives insight as to where your traffic is coming from and so you can determine whether your social media activity is a waste of time or whether it is paying off.

It can also let you know the type of posts which bring in the most traffic and the type of content you should be creating moving forward.

Through the help of Google Analytics, one can determine where the best traffic is coming from thereby allowing you to focus your effort in the right direction. One can also use Facebook Insights and EdgeRank Checker which is a freemium tool to provide suggestions to maximize social media activity. Even YouTube offers analytics and breaks down audiences according to gender, age and location.

Conclusion

There are so many tools and techniques one can use and a lot of what you read about now will be outdated in a couple of months but if you ensure that your social media campaign has the essential components to make a difference to your marketing, you will be able to drive traffic to your site and have successful lead generation.

How often should you update your social media platforms?

Oct 272011

With Social Media Marketing, the question is always “How often should one post on Facebook?” and “When is the best time to post updates?” The answer is both simple and a little more complicated than one might expect…You should post updates when the most recent update as stopped showing up in your fans’ News feed.

When you post often, you may see higher News Feed impressions but most likely, it is not worth the lost fans as when they see two status updates or more from you in one news feed, they are likely to get annoyed and unsubscribe. However, if you post too infrequently, opportunities are missed to reach your fans. The larger your fan page, the more often you should be posting, but be careful not to annoy fans.

The other spanner in the works is that some posts may last ten hours, while others will last a whole day and even longer. The average post lifetime is about 20 hours, which means that you should post at least once a day, however, each post really is unique. If you don’t track your posts in real time, you can find that you could be invisible in the News Feed for hours at a time or you could delay your next post if you have a high-performing post.

The important thing to remember is that you can’t know how your fans will respond to a different posting strategy unless you try it and it is important to try new methods as you may find something that works even better. Constant improvements to your social media marketing strategy will mean better reach, and better results.

Do you have a strategy or are you just winging it?

Aug 112011

A strategy is one of the most important things to have in place when marketing your business, especially online. Up until recently it was enough to have a website, be listed on online directories, run a Google Ad campaign or two and one could get by. A couple of brave companies made the jump and created a Facebook Profile and it was enough that they had one even if it wasn’t updated regularly, their customers could see that they had an online presence and that they were interested in interacting with social media.

Whether or not to include social networking in your strategy is no longer a matter of choice. Unless you plan on being the only company in the world without a social media presence, and you wish to have a solid marketing plan, you should already have your social strategy in place. Yes, I mean an actual strategy to interact socially with your customers.

Social networking is about staying connected with the right people, not just your friends or copious amounts of people that will never do business with you. People who ‘like’ your page on Facebook need to make a conscious decision to do so, which means that you have to connect with them on some level in order for them to do so. So at this point, one has to think about the ways and means of connecting with your customers at this point in order to get them to ‘like’ your page.

Your competitors will also be planning to use social media in order to connect with their clients. It is important that you keep in the running and continue to connect with your customers while ensuring that you keep up to date with what your competitors are presenting. You also need to be able to counteract negative comments so that you can state your case or remedy situations as you need to. If you don’t know about a complaint, you cannot offer a solution to your disgruntled customers and you run the risk of your competitors seeing your lack of response and tending to your customers’ unmet needs. Even if you are not watching what your competitors are doing, you can be sure that they are watching you.

Your online presence will also be able to indicate that you are a professional. The number of results on a search will benefit you as well as your customers as they will know you have put effort into developing your online presence and you will get their business due to your diligence in developing it. Your customers will choose you over the competition when they see that your presence online is more established, informative and trustworthy. When they see that you are available to them and are willing and able to give support – that is when they will make the decision to do business with you and you are able to build up a loyal client base.

The important thing to remember is that you have to talk to people as though they are people (since that is what they are ) and not just as customers. The aim of the game is to ensure that your interactions are valuable and lasting, not fleeting interactions that don’t last for more than a moment.