Should you be using social media to build your brand?

The answer is…it depends.

Your question should not be whether or not you should be using social media to build your brand. It should be, “Is my ideal customer using social media?” If they are, you should be too.

Here are some stats from the Social Media Examiner that show the growth in social media:

• By 2010, 26 million (1 in 7) U.S. adults will use Twitter monthly (eMarketer)
  
  
• In September, Facebook officially hit the 300 million-user mark, making the social networking site nearly as large as the U.S. population. (eMarketer)
  
  
• Americans spend 17% of their online time on social media sites (Center for Media Research)
  
  
• Blogs are the most useful social media tool, say 51% of businesses (McKinsey Quarterly’s “Global Survey”)
  

If your business or organization is targeting consumers, whether you’re a grocery store or a charity, there are likely huge benefits to utilizing social media to build your brand. Creating a blog, a Facebook fan page and a Twitter account (for starters) will provide new access points to engage with your ideal customers. If you are targeting businesses, you should also look at LinkedIn, as it’s a social networking tool for businesses.

A few points to keep in mind:

1. Social media takes time
It will take time to develop content and time to attract fans and followers. You must commit to set aside the time to produce consistent content on a consistent basis.

2. Aim to provide value to your ideal customer
The organizations that succeed in social media are focused on providing valuable content for their audience. The ones who fail tend to just talk about themselves.

3. You can streamline content delivery
Using RSS feeds, you can set blog posts to automatically update your Facebook page and Twitter account. Using HootSuite or TweetDeck, you can add new Tweets and update your Facebook page. I wouldn’t advocate relying solely on automation for content delivery, but it provides a consistent base, while making your life easier.

4. Focus on building your brand
Remember that you are building your brand by shaping your ideal customer’s experience with your organization. Your content and conversations should support your brand platform and emphasize what differentiates you from the competition.

5. Remember the objective
By engaging in social media, you still want to lead a customer along the path to conversion – a sale, subscription to an e-newsletter, attending a webinar, etc. Don’t hesitate to include a call to action…but demonstrate the value to them first.

Need help using social media to build your brand? Contact me for a consultation.

Choose Your Customers, Choose Your Future

I recently added a post that asked Are You Marketing to Your Ideal Customer?

I just saw this post online by Seth Godin that speaks to the same idea. Trying to be all things to all people is a common problem with many businesses that will likely lead to mediocrity, but if you strive to be great to a finely defined ideal customer, you'll have a better chance at success!

Search Engine Optimization that Builds Your Brand

5 Tips to Optimize Your Website while Building Your Brand

Before thinking about search engine optimization (SEO), it’s important to establish your branding platform (e.g. being real and remarkable), know who your ideal customer is and match your brand messaging to that customer. If you haven’t established that, your SEO effort will likely lack focus and discipline, so I’d encourage you to go back and read those blog posts. If you have, you’re ready for these 5 tips to utilize SEO to build your brand online.

First, a word about SEO. There are many tactics you can employ to optimize your site and increase traffic, but it’s vital that the traffic is relevant – comprised of your ideal customers – or chances are that the visitors will essentially be “window shopping”. Many SEO experts are only focused on traffic, so before you contract one, be sure that they understand how to attract your ideal customer.

Google, by far the #1 search engine, ranks pages based on a combination of relevance and page rank. Relevance is largely controlled on your site and is calculated based on your optimization of the particular keyword term. Page rank is driven mainly by links from other sites to yours. These tips will deal with both factors.

1. Do your homework
Before optimizing, do some research to determine the keyword terms your ideal customers will be searching. Write down five keyword phrases that you think your ideal customers will be searching and run them through Wordtracker or the Google Keyword Tool to see how popular those terms are, how much competition there will be for each term and which related terms you may want to consider. This will give you a strong indication of which terms you should optimize for best results.

2. Develop dedicated landing pages for each search term
By setting up a separate page in your website dedicated to each term you have decided to optimize, you will have a much better chance of having that page being deemed relevant for that term by Google. For example, if you have a New York law firm, you may wish to have a page dedicated to one particular area of law within your practice if the search terms are telling you that your ideal customers are likely searching for terms related to that area.

3. Incorporate the search terms in 3 key places
Ensure the search terms are utilized in 3 key places: page titles, page headers, and body content. When doing so, be sure to use language that will appeal to your ideal customer and stay true to the key message you’ve developed for your brand platform. The trick is maintaining a balance that will be effective for search engines AND your ideal customers.

4. Build links to your site
In general, the more links that point to your site, the greater your Google page rank will be, thus helping your site get higher in Google search results. There are simple ways to build links (e.g. via directories, industry member sites, etc.) that should be your first steps. You can also build links through social media, a blog, online press release services and other means that you can control. These will all help.

5. Create relevant content
The best way to garner worthwhile links is to create great content online. If your ideal customers find the content valuable, they will share it with others. This could be via blogs, Twitter, Delicious, Digg, etc., all of which will increase your page rank. If a site with a high page rank links to your site, that’s likely more valuable than all of those directory links.

Hope that helps demystify search engine optimization for you. These are basic tips, but if you follow them, you’ll be well on your way to attracting more relevant traffic to your site. If you'd prefer to contract this task to a specialist, our team at ICON can help you build traffic and build your brand.

Are you marketing to your IDEAL Customer?

Move your focus from a target market to a target individual

From Chip and Dan Heath, authors of Made to Stick, come this illustration of the ideal customer:

Trader Joe’s is a specialty food market that carries inexpensive, but exotic, foodstuffs. At Trader Joe’s you might purchase Moroccan-flavored simmer sauce or a quart of red pepper soup.

Trader Joe’s describes its ideal customer as an “unemployed college professor who drives a very, very used Volvo.” The image is a simplification, obviously - at any given moment there are likely zero of these actual customers in Trader Joe’s. However, the people who frequent the stores share some of the values and characteristics of the fictional ideal customer.

A crucial element of every strategy is deciding which markets and customers a company will serve. The “unemployed college professor” speaks directly to this issue. Trader Joe’s could have referred to its customers as “people who are high socio-economic status and are quality-conscious, but also budget-conscious, and who value variety and new experiences.” But this adjective-filled statement is nowhere near as vivid an image as the unemployed college professor with a very, very used Volvo.

Trader Joe’s then makes branding decisions based on this caricature of their ideal customer. For example, if they were making decisions on whether or not to carry a new product line, they would ask how would it appeal to the unemployed college professor. If they were developing a promotion, they would tailor it to appeal to the unemployed college professor. It provides focus and direction for their branding efforts.

So how would you describe your ideal customer? At ICON, we find it sometimes helps to start thinking about fictional characters from TV shows or movies who may apply and then to fine-tune that character into a customized and vivid image. One thing’s for sure, once you know who you are trying to reach, you’ll have a better handle on how to best reach them and capture their attention.