Using Online Communities to Create Brand Awareness - Part 2

This is Part 2 of my thoughts on Using Online Communities to Build Brand Awareness.  Last time I discussed how online communities help you build credibility and general awareness about your products and brand.  This time I want to discuss how online communities help you create SEO-aware content, and how they can help you build customer satisfaction.

Many marketing directors don't realize that as you are building awareness through your community posts, you are also creating SEO-aware content.  All posts and comments are index-able.  Search engines such as Google are able to look through and "store" your posts from an online community.  Because these posts are on a website other than your own, Google gives this content more weight, since it considers content about you on other websites more relevant.  As a result, your brand name and product information move up in ranking within relevant search results. 

Google also looks for links back to your website.  Make sure to put the address of your website in your signature.  This insures that your website's address is always displayed with every post, and that it is indexed as many times as possible when a search engine crawls the online community's site.

As you post more searchable content, it becomes easier for existing customers to find information that may help them solve problems.  Online communities are a great way to get involved in the first steps of basic customer service issues.  You can use the posts of others as an opportunity to acknowledge issues with your product.  You can also show your willingness via the public domain to serve the customer and create a positive brand experience.  However, remember that people tend to be more vocal on the internet, because it's a more anonymous experience.  You must always write posts that are calm, clear, and emotion free.  Use positive language, but never "beat around the bush" when a clear acknowledgement of a problem is best.

Remember that today being a part of online communities is necessary when marketing digitally, because it gives you a direct opportunity to build credibility, build awareness, create SEO-aware content, and address customer service issues.

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Using Online Communities To Create Brand Awareness - Part 1

We should always endeavor to connect with our customers.  Isn't that one of the great goals and mysteries of marketing and branding?  What is the best way to connect with our customers?  How should we convince them to purchase our products?  How can we spend AS LITTLE MONEY as possible doing this and still make a profit?

It seems that many small businesses, and even large ones, still have not discovered the online community "gold mine".  Being a part of online communities is necessary, because it gives you a direct opportunity to build credibility, build awareness, create SEO-aware content, and address customer service issues.

Online communities give you a direct way to connect with consumers and build credibility.  Online communities allow you to present yourself as a subject manner expert.  By answering consumer's questions and helping them solve their problems in a friendly, non-pressured manner, you present yourself as a credible and knowledgeable, even though you are somewhat biased towards your product as a solution.  With a good attitude, and a friendly, clear writing style, you can present your product and brand as the wise solution to their needs.

As you are helping community members meet their needs, you are constantly building awareness.  Your participation helps to show others their potential need for your product.  Also, your participation helps to inform others of the existence of your product who may not have known about you.  Online communities also provide you with a great opportunity to receive feedback about your product.  If you are an advertiser in that community, you can also build awareness by posting news releases about new models and product updates.

Next time we will discuss using online communities to create more SEO-aware content and help create positive brand experiences via customer service.

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It's about the content, not the algorithm

SEO. Search Engine Optimization.  For the past few years, no other term (other than Social Media) has owned the mindshare of marketers and business owners when it comes to the web.  It's almost a foregone assumption: if I build a website, I must perform SEO.  If I own a website, I must perform SEO.

The next big assumption is that performing SEO means either hiring an expensive "SEO Company", or getting a "SEO For Dummies" book and doing it yourself.  What exactly are you doing when you are "SEO'ing"?  Altering "alt" tags, meta data, headers, tagging images, keyword selection, link-backs...it's almost as mind-boggling as trying to guess how many letters there are in a can of alphabet soup.  Why are we putting ourselves through this insanity?  It's because we desparately want to be at the top of Google's listings.  We want to meet, beat, and even fool Google's algorithm at it's own game. 

It's time to stop the insanity.  Sure, having as much of your content indexable as possible is worthwhile.  Sure, you want to have good keyword selection and contextual page titles.  But lets get one thing clear.  No matter the algorithm, if you don't have relevant content, and others don't think you're content is relevant, Google isn't going to care either.

Google cares the most about relevant content.  If your content is actually about what you claim your website or webpage is addressing, then your content is relevant, or contextual.  If you title your page "Dogs", but you present information about cats, then it is not relevant.  Google and it's genius engineers have figured out how to "crawl" your website, examine your content, and rate it's relevancy.  It grades everything on your page that it can search, or "index.

Not only must your content be relevant, but it must be updated frequently.  Google will index your site on a set schedule once it "finds" you for the first time.  How often you update your content, or create new content, will determine how often Google "decides" to visit your site.  If you create a site, and never update it, then Google will eventually "decide" to visit your site more infrequently, and as a result, it will lower you in relevant search results.  But if you continually update your site, and continue to create relevant content, Google will raise you in it's search results.  Old and stale = forgotten and unimportant.  Fresh and exciting = relevant and important.

Even if you write relevant content, and keep it fresh, unless others also think it is relevant, then Google will not raise you up the search ranking results.  How do others make you relevant?  Link backs.  The more people, in contextual situations, link back to you, then your content is relevant.  What is a contextual situation?  Link farms are NOT contextual situations.  In fact, Google has clamped down on this practice; recently altering its algorithms to remove link farms from the equation.  So many people were "playing" the system with link farms and dummy websites that Google re-worked it's code to severely discount the influence of link farms and dummy websites.

What Google did was increase the relevancy of a website, with content relevant to yours, linking back to you.  For example, a blog post talking about dog sweaters, mentioning your comments about them, and linking back to your site, is relevant.  A series of forum posts on a public community forum site about dog sweaters, with links back to you in those posts, are relevant.  A series of social media posts on Facebook or Twitter, mentioning content about dog sweaters and linking back to your site, are relevant.

Google cares about content that others care about, and if they care about you, then Google cares about you.  So go ahead and optimize those page headers.  Make your site's content match your keywords.  Make as much of your website able to be indexed as possible.  But if your content isn't relevant, and if others don't care about your content, then Google won't either.

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Blogging Effectively

Sage Lewis at the SageRock Digital Marketing Blog wrote that people don't blog as much as they use other social media because, "I think it’s because they see blogging as a big thing." Translation: Blogging is hard.  Blogging is not "hard".  People don't blog, because they are unsure what to do with it.  They don't know how to use it effectively.

Like any use of media, blogging starts with a plan.  Planning helps you set goals, build discipline, and write with purpose.

Goals help you have a purpose.  Without goals, you're blog, or any other type of marketing, is ineffective.  Goals help you focus.  All of your posts should lead towards one common goal, one common claim or idea.  For example, what if you created the most comfortable seat cushion in the world?  What if your goal was to sell one million by the end of the year?  Then all of your posts should be focused on convincing someone of the virtues of properly padded buttocks...which can be achieved with your amazing seat cushion.  Your posts could feature customer stories, or the results of studies about padded versus un-padded seats.  Each post focuses on one reason that someone should buy your seat cushion, which helps you reach one million unit sales.

Regular blogging also helps you develop the discipline you need to reach your goals.  Without discipline, it's impossible to reach a long term goal. Jim Whittaker said, "You can never conquer the mountain.  You can only conquer yourself."  The mountain is the sales goal.  Climbing the mountain means defeating the army of doubt, laziness, and busyness.  Doubt tells you that you will never sell enough of your product, and that no one will read your blog.  Laziness prevents you from spending the time to plan what you are going to write, when you are going to write it, writing it, and editing it.  Busyness lets you make excuses, allowing life's events to constantly get in the way of your online marketing plan.  

Setting goals and practicing discipline with your blogging frees you up to write with a purpose.  If you're not writing with a purpose, your blog becomes a set of random, rambling posts. Start by creating a list of all of the things you want to say that relate to your main goal.  Next, create a short outline for each item on your list.  Spend time each week developing and writing about each item on your list.  Eventually it will become easy, and you will develop a weekly writing routine.  Another benefit to this weekly writing plan is that it will build up content on your blog over time.  That content can be indexed by search engines such as Google.  Eventually you will have a large mass of indexed, searchable content.  Google also grades your blog higher if you're posting relevant content more frequently.  A stale, rarely updated blog will almost never appear on Google search results.  If you're also participating in online forums and other online communities, make sure you are linking back to your blog in your signature.  This helps build a "web" of links going back to your blog, and over time it can improve your search rankings, since Google gives your site a higher ranking when others link to you.

Create a plan, set a goal, practice discipline, and write with a purpose.  You just might find that the skills you develop writing a blog will end up permeating other parts of your life as well.

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"Post Frequenly" ... and OFTEN on Facebook

Recently, Hussein Fazal posted a piece on AdAge, presenting six, logical, fundamental steps to effective marketing through Facebook.  His third point, "Post Frequently", caught my attention.  The reason is a basic practice of effective advertising: frequency.

Let's review the basic concept behind frequency: effective frequency (note the word effective) is the number of times a person must be exposed to a message before a response (such as buying) is made and before exposure to the marketing has become wasteful economically.  There have been numerous studies on this.  Many of them have a different conclusion.  However, most seem to agree that 5-7 impressions is a bare minimum. (I'm sure some of you disagree, but work with me here)

For any medium to be used effectively, frequency must be practiced.  However, the problem is many businesses still don't give proper weight to online media in general.  They don't believe (until someone presents them with proper statistics and decent research) that marketing online CAN give you a good ROI.  The other problem is many individuals (even ad agencies and skilled consultants) tend to jump into blogging and social media with gusto, but never keep up the discipline (frequency) necessary to see an effective blogging or social media effort through.  

Here's my point:  it's easy for someone to post once a week, and then 3 times the next, and then 2 times the next...but to keep posting every week, with purpose, with a plan, takes effort.  Don't just post often, plan often.  Put together a long term plan that meets your specific goals.  This plan should cover at least a few months, if not an entire calendar year (or two if you know what your product development cycle will be).  It takes time to form a relationship with your customers, no matter what medium you are using to market to them.  Use that time to give them reasons to come back to you, buy from you, and tell others about you.  Change your content often.  Change your marketplace ads often.  Change your incentives often.

In other words...do what you are going to do, often.

Read more on the 6 Step Blueprint for Facebook

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