Implementing Social Media Into Your Local Marketing Mix

With hundreds of millions of folks logging into Facebook everyday it’s obvious that it won’t be going anywhere soon. As a Small Local Business Owner there are certain actions you can take on Facebook that will give you much better traction. In order to become successful there are certain daily actions you will need to take. The keys to the castle will be yours if you can learn how to market the right way Using Social Media.

What You Need To Focus On

List Building – Use Social Media to build your mailing list and engage your prospects. Once you build a healthy list you have a cash on demand database of hungry prospects that are itching to do business with your company.

Own Your Own Blog – When I say your own blog, that is exactly what I mean. You need complete control of your blog. Never get a free blog, it must be on a domain you own and control. Plus who is going to take you seriously if you are hosting a free blog? I’m not comfortable with the idea of giving someone else control over any aspect of my business, and Jeff nor myself will ever recommend that any of our clients do this either.

Your Small Local Business Prospects that are using Social Media these days are looking for information about a particular business before they make a decision as to whether they want to use it or not. For example a prospect might be looking for a Bankruptcy Attorney. They might trust an attorney with an active Facebook Page that’s constantly engaging with their target audience than an attorney with a Facebook Page that hasn’t posted on it in 20 months. It doesn’t matter which attorney is “better”. It’s all about using the web to build trust with clients and once you truly understand that this is the only proper way to use Social Media you’ll be set for life.

You should always aim to drive people from your Social Media Pages to your company blog. Once they get to your blog you will use it to create multiple calls to action with them. One good example of this would be to offer them a 50% off coupon for subscribing to your email list. You can place a nice Opt-In Form on your blog to make it real easy for people to get on your list.

There’s also a WordPress Plugin called the WP Greet Box. This will give you the ability to show your visitors an ad at the top of each of your blog posts. This is a perfect way to drive traffic from your blog to your website.

You should get accounts at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter just for starters. There are WP Plugins and other software that will teach you how to integrate all these services properly. For example each time I make a blog post, it also gets placed on our companies Facebook Fan Page and our Twitter page. This is a concept called Social Media Integration, and it multiplies your blogging efforts by giving you a Social Media Presence at the same time. Doing this right now will put you 10 steps ahead of the competition.

But if you wait 2 more years before you do any of this you may not be able to get the required traction necessary to stay ahead of your competition.