Marketing Is More than Working Referrals

Venture online, beyond client networking and trade shows
by Meryl Evans, Editor, Professional Services Journal

Stock investors often say, "Diversify!" Imagine if you have all of your stock in one company, and poof! It goes bankrupt. This scenario, sadly, has happened repeatedly.

Stocking all your referral eggs into trade shows or client recommendations limits your opportunities. The eggs could meet the same fate as Humpty Dumpty. But if we split up the eggs into a few baskets, and one breaks, we still have some to fall back on. Other baskets worthy of your investment include email newsletters, Web sites, blogs and feeds. These grow your business and help you build better relationships with prospects and clients.

Online tools

Not all businesses advertise or market on TV, radio, newspapers or billboards. Why not? Because those vehicles may not be the best way to reach their target market. Web sites, though, provide a diversity of options for building relationships — beyond the static sites that rarely see updates.

Why bother with the different online options? Think about the different ways you can prepare your eggs: Sunny side up, over easy, hard-boiled, poached, scrambled or in an omelet. People have preferences, likes and dislikes, so not everyone goes for one dish. Connect with prospects and clients with some or all of the following tools:

• Email newsletters
• Blogs
• Feeds
• Bulletin boards/discussion forums
• Wikis

When companies use tools like these to interact with the community, it makes them more accessible and puts a face behind the company. These also help keep the site regularly updated with fresh content, which is always a good thing, especially with search engines.

Email newsletters continue to thrive

With spam continuously invading our inboxes in large numbers, some believe the email newsletter is dead. Not true. Newsletters allow companies to build and retain relationships with their clients. Just like some people prefer eggs sunny side up, some prefer to receive email newsletters, as opposed to using other online tools.

Blogs, feeds, bulletin boards and wikis complement newsletters. Some readers refuse to read email newsletters and only view content in RSS feed readers. So widen your reach by offering both options.

When a newsletter full of valuable information arrives in the user’s inbox, it capitalizes on these two main uses: email and information. When applied in a business-to-business application, email newsletter marketing has even more power. According to Pew Internet & American Life Project’s findings, 91 percent of Internet users send and read email. Over 70 percent of U.S. adults are connected to the Internet. Therefore, email newsletters in a B2B application miss only a small percentage of their target market, the decision makers.

Blogs invade businesses

Weblogs aren’t just for telling our sob stories or life adventures anymore. Blogs, as Weblogs are better known, can be online articles, essays, entries, diaries and journals. A typical blog contains entries displayed in order from most recent entry on forward to the older ones.

When a blogger posts entries, users can read and comment on them. Most blogging applications come with comments. Bloggers can monitor comments or leave them open for anyone to comment. They can delete comments, especially when they’re offensive or comment spam — comments from spammers who post repeated comments with links to sites to boost their search engine results.

CEOs, CIOs, vice presidents and many others have jumped into the blogging waters to give a voice to their companies. They provide commentary on the industry, insight into strategies and advice on general business practices.

While the decision on whether to blog and who should blog for the company is an article of its own, here are the basic requirements to think about when considering whether to get into blogging:

• Add a new entry at least three times a week.
• Discuss topics, rather than just linking to others.
• Read other blogs.
• Provide valuable information to readers, rather than just talk about your company.

While successful blogs have broken these rules, these exceptions are rare. Whenever you release a new issue of your email newsletter, blog it. Do the same in the newsletter — refer to your blog. By tying your blog and newsletter together, you reach the blogging audience members who may not know about your newsletter until they read about it in your blog and vice versa. Read more about business blogging in these books:

• Blogging for Business: Everything You Need to Know and Why You Should Care
  by Shel Holtz and Ted Demopoulos
• The Corporate Blogging Book: Absolutely Everything You Need to Know to Get It Right
  by Debbie Weil
• Naked Conversations: How Blogs Are Changing the Way Businesses Talk with Customers
  by Robert Scoble and Shel Israel
• What No One Ever Tells You About Blogging and Podcasting
  by Ted Demopoulos

Feeding with feeds

Rather than go to the Web site to read a blog, some people read the blog through a news reader, feed reader or aggregator application. Such applications can be downloaded and used on your computer, like FeedDemon, or are Web-based, like Bloglines. News readers make it possible to read all of your favorite blogs and online content in one place.

While news feeds were originally associated with blog content, they can be available for any online content. You may have seen the RSS or XML icons, text along the lines of "Syndicate this site" or a button that says you can subscribe with a specific feed reader service or application like Bloglines, MSN Alerts, MyYahoo! and more.

(Editor’s note: If you’d like to know more about feeds, here’s an article.)

Next time you go to a Web site, look for the feed. Any page on a Web site can be a feed, but a feed isn’t appropriate for just any content. Regularly updated content is a great candidate for a feed. Even newsletters like this one have a feed.

Take advantage of feeds and refer to other content you have in your marketing toolbox. If you have a feed for your newsletter, mention something new on the Web site or at a trade show you’re attending.

The trick to spreading your eggs out is to have all of your content point to each other, business cards included. Business cards can have URLs to the Web site, newsletter and anything else that’s appropriate and fits on the small card. A long URL won’t go over well. Instead, use a URL shortening service, as many don’t cost anything.

Opening the doors with forums

Forums — also known as bulletin boards, discussion boards, discussion groups and message boards — offer online meeting places where users can discuss topics, without being logged in at the same time. Forums typically require registration to avoid abuse, but some let users post anonymously. To use a forum, usually all a user needs is a Web browser, a sign-on ID and a password.

To keep things under control, forums might have moderators who have the ability to edit or delete messages and remove user access. Unlike a blog, a forum allows anyone to start a new discussion. In blogs, only the bloggers can start a new topic, but the commenting feature lets readers get involved.

When an interesting discussion occurs in a forum, talk about it in a newsletter or a blog to involve others. Some businesses use forums so users can help each other with product problems and questions. Experts might track the forums to help when no one else can.

Some colleges and universities with online classes use forums so professors and students can interact and discuss course-related materials and projects. Do a search for "forums" and see the diversity of topics including hobbies, business, careers, industries, games and more. Companies also use forums so teams can collaborate or build a community among employees located miles from each other.

Wikis take collaboration a step further

Wikis, like forums, involve multiple users who can start a discussion or topic. But unlike forums, wikis allow users to edit other people’s content. A person can create a new page, and another person — who has more information — can add onto the original article and make changes.

While anyone having the ability to edit anything sounds like a recipe for disaster, it doesn’t happen often. Wikis can be protected with a password to prevent potential problems. Wikipedia is a giant wiki, thanks to its 13,000+ contributors who manage over 1,800,000 articles in 100+ languages. Over 960,000 of those articles are in English.

Pages in a wiki connect to each other through links. Creating a link in a wiki depends on the software used. A link could be created with a simple: [This is a link] (brackets around the item to be linked); *This is a link*; or some other way. Working with a wiki resembles using a word processor.

Wikis, like forums, come in handy for team collaboration. A software development team could use a wiki to document features and show how to use them. A marketing team could track its projects and updates with a wiki. The options for collaborating with a wiki are many.

Which tools are right for you?

Consider the many features newsletters, blogs, feeds, forums and wikis have. Also, look to what others are doing. Organizations that develop forum, blog and wiki software list the applications’ features on their Web sites. You can check them out to help figure out what you need.

Keep in mind that content management systems (CMS) and communications management systems come with these tools built in. Even if a CMS that best fits your needs doesn’t come with a tool you want, you can always add on with another product.

Make the most of your online marketing efforts by integrating all available options including email newsletters, RSS feeds, blogs and a Web site. It’s a cheap and effective way to reach your prospects and clients.

You may find one, two or none of these communications tools works for you. No matter which you choose, seamlessly put your information into more than one basket to reach as wide an audience as possible.

Meryl K. Evans is the content maven behind this newsletter. She has written for The Dallas Morning News, PC Today, InformIT and others. You can contact her at Meryl@InternetVIZ.com or stop by her blog.