Social Media Marketing

Build a Local and Relevant Following

One of the many questions that surface from our clients as they begin to think about launching a Social Media Strategy for their business is targeted traffic and followers. A local design studio in Kansas City isn’t interested in twitter followers and blog readers from Birmingham, Alabama. And while building a strong twitter following and blog readership isn’t a perfect science, there are many tools, coupled with a little guerrilla marketing that can greatly enhance the overall quality of your digital footprint.

Business is About the Numbers

Business success is and has always been about the numbers, or said differently, results. Growing the size of your digital footprint doesn’t happen without a plan to do so. Can you get some general organic growth, yes, but likely only a trickle without a consistent aggregation method. There are also specific phases of an integrated digital marketing life cycle. We believe that the cornerstone your social media marketing plan is your business blog. As we begin to populate your business blog with quality, relevant posts we also reach out to local folks in the digital space that may have interest in becoming contributors

Where Are They Hiding

There are an array of tools in your digital toolbox to help sharpen your hunting skills. One such tool we use is the search function in tweetdeck to ferret out local, relevant followers and blog contributors. For example, we have an apartment client in downtown Chicago, Left Bank at K Station Apartments that we have created a custom sherpa digital marketing program for. We have launched a life style blog, Left Bank Life to help them drive traffic and rental leads to their web site. We set up search categories for “West Loop”, “Fulton River District” and several other local search strings. When you Fish Where the Fish Are, you catch fish, and we have a series of Guest Bloggers lined up.

Locals Expand Your Digital Footprint

The newspapers used local news and happenings effectively. Local people and stories get talked about. Not only do local folks help you expand your reach, they also bring into the mix their own following, which quickly begins to expand. While not everyone you come across will be suitable writers, many are and they love to tell and share their story. But with that, they also begin to tell your story, as your brand gets talked about. That is how buzz gets started, people talking about your brand, which is why social media works.

Let us help tell your story

With over a thousand digital sherpa clients in several different verticals, we are helping brands and businesses share their story, and expand their digital footprint. We can get people talking, by getting people talking.

If you would like to discuss how NCI can help your business get started on a social media marketing plan, heres how you can contact us, We look forward to chatting,

You can find Eric on twitter or ebrown@nci.com

You can find Adam on twitter or ajapko@nci.com

Social Media Marketing

Our roughly 1,000 Digital Sherpa clients buy one of our Sherpa programs for a variety of reasons.  Of course everyone likes to attract online traffic, find new customers and generate leads.  And while those are outcomes of a good social media and content marketing program, that’s not always what brings our customers to our virtual door step.

Some buy it for the content creation; it takes a lot of time and discipline to write 2 quality blog posts per week.  But there are a great many who buy our program because they want to build a social media presence.

The adoption of businesses in the social media space has been exploding in the past year.  And Sherpa clients are a part of that surge of businesses on that leading edge of social media adoption.  But often when we ask new clients why they want to build a social media presence, the answers range from “because I don’t want to be left behind” to “my son/daughter/grandson/friend said I should” to “I really don’t know, but I feel like I probably should”.

The answer to why you want to be in social media can be found in a recently published report from Comscore.  Comscore is an internet marketing research firm that tracks and reports on online behavior.  Their recent report “Women on the Web:  How Women are Shaping the Internet” gives some great insight into the very question of why you want to be in social media.   The report speaks for itself, but I’ll highlight a few things I found particularly relevant:

• Women are more enagaged than men on the internet
• Social networking is central to women’s internet experience
• Women drive a disproportionate amount of online spending
• 9 out of 10 women in North America visited a social networking site in April 2010

Social networking sites are prime areas for attracting new customers whether you want to lure them to online sales or to visit your showroom.  The audience is there, what are you doing to make sure they find you?