Quality communication marketing tips and tricks with Edan Gelt: Posting videos on this social channel is great for professional B2B content. LinkedIn rewards videos content by sharing it with more of your contacts than traditional text or picture posts. If you upload video directly (natively embed it) versus linking to YouTube, you will reach an even larger audience. Here, you’ll want to upload your video directly to their platforms. You can boost your videos and/or run them as ads to get a larger reach but continue to post and repost your videos organically on your accounts. Even if you think your content is all business and not playful enough – get creative and don’t miss these channels as Facebook has nearly 2 billion users and twitter has over 300 million. For Facebook specifically, you can ‘pin’ a post to the top of your post. So no matter how many posts you create after that, this ‘pinned’ post will always remain on top. See additional details at Edan Gelt.
Consumers and business leaders are suffering from unprecedented stress and uncertainties. With the lockdowns and restrictions coming and going and economic uncertainty hanging over everything. In this climate, brands are having to be more sensitive in their communication strategies. The last thing anyone wants to see right now is an advertisement full of smiling revelers having the holiday of a lifetime. While the rest of us are stuck at home worrying about our health, jobs and when we will get to see families and friends next.
Stick to it: Identify your strategy, value and messaging at the get go. When you waiver and change your position frequently, you waste valuable dollars and lose trust with your target market. Get it right, right away. That’s not saying you can’t make small changes along the way or as you grow but know who you are and stay the course. Laser Focus: Identify who you are trying to reach. You can’t be everything to everyone or you will wind up being nothing to no one. Come to the market understanding not only who you are trying to reach but also what their needs are. Identify your target market and learn about them; research what they value, where they look for content, what their pain points are and how your service, product or business fulfills that need or eases the pain.
Once you are set up on your desired platforms and posting, the next step is to build trust and create relationships with your audience. A great way to do this is to actively engage with them. When a customer shares a positive experience, go further than saying a generic “thank you”, give a personalised open-ended response. People love it when a brand takes the time to have a conversation with them – one on one. Even if it’s a fun and playful conversation, people will remember your brand more for how you made them feel. For more social media and brand communication tips? Discover even more info on Eden Gelt.
Real Estate agent? Take your clients on a virtual ride with you through the streets of a neighborhood and talk about why you’re the area expert. You can touch on school district borders, housing market stats, or even the current night-life. Virtual open-houses have become highly popular during the pandemic so show your clients a listing. You can even have your clients play a game of car-pool karaoke on your next showing and let your playful personality shine through. Testimonials live from clients would also be a great feature.
Stepping outside of your target audience might seem daunting but this is crucial to increase exposure of your product and company. Free samples increase your product and company’s awareness. Since this broad, new audience now has your product in their hands, consumers make both a physical and mental connection. Next time they are in the store or shopping online and come across your product, they are more likely to make a purchase. Thus, making the transition to becoming a customer all because of the familiarity they had from your free sample.
In my last blog “Marketing and the Power of Free” and subsequent vlog, I wrote about the impact of giving away products and/or free services. By sampling or giving your product away at no cost builds brand awareness, increases sales and enhances your budget. But how does it work and why? Have you ever been to Costco and enjoyed the free samples? How often did you buy what you tried because you really enjoyed it? And if you didn’t buy the product, did you feel guilty? Maybe you even put the product in your cart and unloaded it a few aisles down. That’s just a sample of the Law of Reciprocity. The law of reciprocity says that when you offer something first for free and it is valued, people feel a sense of indebtedness toward you, thus in turn you then wanting to return the favor.
Similar to traditional SEO for websites, Google uses bots to serve search results. It is important to include keywords like “Chicago Real Estate Attorney,” “Orland Park Real Estate attorney,” “5013C Attorney,” etc. to your business listing is key – especially since your direct business website will be listed within your GMB page. Use these in the business description and each time you post a Local Post to your audience. Posting photos to your GMB is extremely important – in fact, businesses that have photos receive 35% more click-throughs to their website than those without photos and 42% more requests for directions from Google Maps. See additional info on Edan Gelt.
These are examples that have an obvious mechanism toward the building of trust. Consumers have long memories and acts like this will serve these companies well for years to come. But, there are more subtle examples. In the Philippines, the CEO of the McDonald’s operation in that country created a video. This video details the safety measures McDonald’s is taking to protect both consumers and their staff. This might seem like an obvious approach. However, at the same time other companies are portraying their staff as ‘heroes.’ This approach is being criticized for ignoring the fact that the employees are in as much need of protection as the consumers are.
3…2…1…ACTION It’s game time and there is no fancy equipment required. Are you ready to film? Just take out your handy phone, iPad or computer and let’s start rolling! Depending on the type of content you are looking to share, you can record 1-minute clips straight through or you can film individual segments and patch them together with film editing software such as iMovie, Open Shot, Movie Maker 10 and more. If you’re not handy with editing, you can hire someone (or recruit your children). You can also just publish raw and real footage. Depending on your business type and brand, sometimes having unedited content may even help you connect better to your client base.
