Does the web development firm include marketing expertise as part of the project team?

The firm you choose may be a great Web development company but if they don’t understand marketing, they could develop a site that never meets your marketing expectations.

If you want to be sure your web presence achieves results, hire a marketing company to help you get the site you want. A marketing firm approaches a web site or blog from the perspective that it is a tool to help you market your business and can put a plan in place to help you do that. Having the marketing person as your point of contact makes the process simpler for you, eliminating the need for you to work directly with the web developer. This person can also translate what you are trying to achieve into what needs to be developed to ensure you get the desired results.

Whether or not those statistics are true, it opened my eyes to the fact that there are many small business owners unaware of these new marketing tools. Some basic education on what these tools are and how they can use it for their business would be a valuable resource. Therefore, I have written the first in a series of articles called Social Media Marketing Basics.

As the title indicates, it is very basic information for those not exposed to this new media as many of us have been. Future articles will dive deeper into the various topics, describing how they can be used to market their businesses. Feel free to read and comment back here on your thoughts and suggestions for the next in the series.

Why is this important?

Professional services businesses sell expertise. You can’t touch the product or get a 30-day trial like you can with a physical (or software) product. A good way to prove that you have the expertise a prospect is looking for is to give some of that knowledge away that intrigues your audience and makes them want more. You can accomplish this by writing articles or tips that would interest your target audience.

When I started my Vista Viewpoint newsletter five years ago, I included an article and a tip of the month. Today, email newsletters are the medium to use when you want to nurture those who have requested your information (that is opted into your mailing list), but a blog with useful tips, articles and information for your target prospect will reach a far wider audience if marketed appropriately. People searching for information will find your blog or podcast and can anonymously subscribe through RSS. Those that find you, are interested in what you have to say and regularly read your information are more likely to call you if they need your services.

People normally choose to do business with those they trust and somehow get to know in some way. Building trust is something your blog or podcast can help you do. So if you are considering one of these newer mediums as marketing tools for your business, don’t shy away from them. However, put a plan in place that describes your frequency, focus and tactics to publicize them, and join the conversation on the Web. It will take time but will pay off in the long run.

My colleague in Vista Consulting, Bob Rentsch, is on the Board of the Greater Worcester Habitat for Humanity and is running an auction to raise funds to help them achieve their mission to “build simple, decent, affordable homes to give low-income families in Central Massachusetts the opportunity for homeownership”.

Last week he found out that his online auction website was one of two dozen that is eligible for a donation from the company that makes the auction software. They will award a $2000 donation to the auction website that gets the most votes in an on-line poll.

Bob’s challenge – to get the word out about how to vote. “Friends and family” emails work, a posting on the website is good too, but Bob was searching for a way to get the message out to supporters. This is the perfect time to use social media marketing to communicate the message in a timely basis and engage the audience to help build momentum.

If you want to help a good cause, help get the word out as well. Plug the contest and send them to the auction web site link to vote for the Greater Worcester Habitat for Humanity. Some family in Central Massachusetts will be forever grateful.

I heard that statement in the context of people’s behaviors in meetings. Having observed many blog posts and their associated comments, I have to say that this statement holds true in the blogosphere as well. Some people have brilliant insight into a topic and their comments to a post are clear and interesting. There are others that seem to comment just because their feel the “have to” or to get the link back to their site.

Engaging people in conversation is a back and forth exercise of comments, commentary and opinion. In person it is stimulating. Via a blog it should be the same. In an in-person conversation, there will be those that listen and not contribute for many reasons. In the blogosphere, the same holds true.

I have not started leaving comments on other blogs yet (although I was tempted to at Matt Cutts blog post on his cat Ozzie). I will in time, but I’m watching, listening and learning the culture of blogs. I’m sure some post will compel me to leave a comment, but for now I just enjoy absorbing all the knowledge of people who want to share it.

Joining the conversation and sharing your knowledge is important, but it is also just as important to listen. By listening to what is being said, you will learn a lot about your customers, prospects and partners. They will appreciate having your ear for a while. Give it to them and then do something that delights them.

What do you think? Should you comment just to comment? Or do you listen, learn and comment when appropriate?

What does this mean for the smaller companies trying to compete?

It means you must take your image seriously and treat the effort with the same importance as all of your marketing efforts. It is time to stop undermining your marketing efforts by ignoring your brand. There are really good designers and Web developers available that can work within your budget. Don’t assume that the cost is out of reach. Speak with a smaller firm about your needs as many are willing to work with you and help you get what you need within your budget. Seek out someone who can help you break up the work into a plan that can be rolled out over time. It is actually better to start with a good design and build on top of it later.

This solution took a little more time to understand and set up, but the demo that comes with it is easy to understand and mimic for your own site. If you are looking for a nice way to feed RSS to your static site to make your visitors come back more often, this solution is another nice option to consider.

I took my cues from David and searched for an easy to use widget to load my blog entries into my web site home page. I came across Kent Brewster’s Badger application that creates Web badges out of any RSS feed. With a little tweaking of the css provided, I was able to integrate the information into the site pretty seamlessly. Being able to put my new posts headlines on my home page makes my web site more interesting to new visitors, encouraging them to visit my blog for more information.

I also updated the web site design to more closely match my blog design. I like the clean look of the blog and wanted to make the same look work for the Web site. With a bit of rearranging and rewriting some of the content, the site looks as good as new. There’s still work to be done, but the site has received the necessary facelift and is ready to go back to work.

Your web site is still very much an important part of your marketing effort and needs to remain equal to your blog if it has served you well. With a little bit of love, your web site can continue to work for your business in conjunction with your blog. It takes a little planning and strategy, but it can be done.

Along came the Internet which has given marketers an additional medium in which to communicate their messages to their target audience. And although it took a while for companies to incorporate Internet marketing within their corporate marketing functions, the Internet is now an integrated part of their overall marketing plan.

So if you have Internet marketing activities in your marketing plan, does that mean you are implementing social media marketing?

Many corporate marketers would like to think so, but there is a fundamental difference between Internet marketing, using the Internet as a means to communicate your message to your target audience, and social media marketing.

Social media makes marketing a multidimensional exercise. It is no longer about pushing your message out to your audience. Social media marketing takes the same Internet technologies and adds interaction with your audience. It’s having your constituents spread your messages for you rather than you talk deafly to some cloud of people who may or may not care about what you have to offer. In some ways it really isn’t much different from word of mouth marketing where your happy clients, colleagues and partners say good things about you and provide you referral business. The difference is the speed with which your message is carried via the social network.

And it’s because of that speed that many corporate marketers are frightened of it. The key is to embrace it and use it because your company is being talked about in social networks and there is nothing you can do to stop it. By participating in the social networking world, letting your customers speak directly to you, and listening to what they have to say, you are more likely to win the hearts and minds of the masses than you will if you hide behind the corporate veneer.

How do you turn your Internet marketing activities into social media marketing?

I am an extremely strong proponent for Internet marketing. It has worked for my business and my clients’ businesses and now we are extending that Internet presence by adding on social media marketing. Every business, small or large, needs to open the communications channels with their audience. Look for opportunities to get feedback on your company, good or bad, and respond. For small businesses, start a blog. It doesn’t matter whether you market B2B or B2C, a blog provides benefits you normally will not get from Internet marketing alone.

In 7 reasons why small businesses should blog, Ben McConnell & Jackie Huba, authors of Citizen Marketers, provide reasons and advice on why you should blog.

Adding social media marketing to your marketing mix is not a difficult project. It does need to be planned so that your social media marketing activities stay on brand with all of your marketing activities. And depending on your company, you may need to evaluate the effect social media marketing has on the culture of your business. But there are ways of evolving your company to take advantage of this new and exciting marketing area. It’s really not that scary afterall.

Part of the reason for this is that I dove into creating my blog one weekend. I had been planning on launching a blog for my business, and like most other things I do, all of a sudden I get the urge to just dive right in. Since my hosting company had the blog software available as part of our hosting plan, I thought I’d take a look and see what it would take to build a blog. The diving was fun, I learned a lot about WordPress, diddled with the template to make it look like my web site, and wrote a few posts. I added the WordPress software to my web site as a subdirectory. Little did I know that my experiment would catch a few folks attention right away before I even launched the blog.

Next fun part was that my hosting company advised me to deinstall WordPress to determine if issues that arose were due to the installation of WordPress or some other issue with PHP. Well, bye bye posts, comment and my patience.

After reconstructing the site and re-entering my posts, I got the blog back online and added a couple more posts. Another comment appears. All is well until I decide to check and see if the domain name vistaviewpoint.com is available just for grins. Not only was it available, I also found vista-viewpoint.com available. With all the activity around Microsoft Vista, I figured I’d better grab those domain names now or they will be gone forever. So now I have the even more interesting exercise of creating the blog at the new domain name. I figure I best do it now before I get more comments, more visibility and subscribers.

I have just finished recreating the blog at the new domain name. You have to admit that being able to point people to www.vistaviewpoint.com rather than www.vista-consulting.com/vistablog/ is much neater.

If you are actually reading this post, then you found the new blog location. Wonderful! Welcome back. Better I do this on my blog than a client’s. Hopefully I have saved a few of you from this exercise. Planning all these details ahead of time certainly makes life easier.