These principals are just as relevant in an online environment, or for an offline/online combination.  As is the case with traditional media combinations, the trick is in determining which online combination is most effective for your business – and the only way to arrive at this is through repeated testing.

An online combination that can  be particularly effective is a website and blog.  HubSpot (a marketing services provider) conducted a survey of 1,531 of its customers (mostly small and medium-sized businesses), comparing those that blogged with those that didn’t.  They found that, on average, the companies that blogged received:

• 55% more visitors
• 97% more inbound links
• 434% more search engine indexed pages

Results of the study are available at Hubspot

You can further maximize the impact of a blog (with or without a website) by adding social media to the combination  to call attention to the blog.  For example, the WordPress blogging platform can be set to automatically Tweet an announcement to your followers:

Get posted on your Facebook page:

And appear on your LinkedIn profile:

Our next post will talk about how you can determine the right online media combination for your specific business.

Stay tuned…

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You may already have a good sense of the general audience make-up of the specific social media frequented by existing customers.  If not, there are tools that provide audience profiles that may be helpful.  A free tool you can use is Quantcast, which specializes in gathering and organizing website audience data including demographic profiles, frequency of visitation statistics and affinities for  specific topics and other websites.  As an example, let’s use Quantcast to look at the top professionally-oriented social media – LinkedIn.  An excerpt from Quantcast’s intro on LinkedIn reads as follows: “Built upon trusted connections and relationships, LinkedIn has established the world’s largest and most powerful community of professionals, with members from over 200 countries, 170 industries, all of the Fortune 500 companies”. The following are taken from some of the charts available on Quantcast.  The first is part of a larger chart depicting the site’s demographic profile and the second provides some visitation statistics.

LinkedIn Demographic Information, Quantcast, December 2009

LinkedIn Traffic Frequency, Quantcast, December 2009

So, if your core market is made up of professionals, they are likely users of LinkedIn and other professionally-oriented social media.  Once you locate them on a site, you can examine their profiles, review their interests and see who they are connected with.  In addition to seeing which individuals your existing and prospective customers are connecting with, you can also see which groups they have joined.  Select and join the groups with topics that may impact your business, observe what is being talked about, what most interests these individuals, and the descriptive language they use. You can choose to just observe or you can participate in their conversations and ask specific questions designed to sharpen your understanding of how they think about a variety of issues (you may also choose to connect with other individuals whose interests overlap with yours).  If we can get a good handle on their interests and concerns, we are more likely to get their attention, address their needs and present solutions.  By adding this input to whatever else you may know about existing clients and prospects (demographic profile, purchase history, etc.), you can start to build fairly detailed target audience snapshots.  Finally, segment these snapshots into self-identifying homogenous groups.

Most social media are similar in allowing people with like interests to connect and share their perspective.  There are also some differences (in the way some function and are used) that should be taken into account when doing research.  Twitter, for example, limits an individual’s profile to 160 characters, and conversations to snippets of no more than 140 characters.  I find that Twitter works well as a search engine to uncover trends and to see what is being said on topics of interest.  Facebook (in addition to the typical friend banter it is known for) also has Groups organized around topics that may contain prospects interested in your professional focus.  And, don’t forget to check-out the local social media in  your area.

The segmented groups of customers and prospects arrived at by using the process described above are generally the same groups you would typically target with other marketing and communication channels.  These channels include your website, blog, email and even traditional media such as print, direct mail and broadcast.  The understanding you have now gained about how the individuals (that make up these groups) think and communicate will enable you to create more compelling communications in any media.   The ability to present a cohesive message, using language and images that prospects are more likely to relate and respond to, will provide you with a decided competitive advantage.

In our next post we will present a framework to help you choose which online media combination is likely to help produce online synergy for your business.

Stay tuned….

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