Over the past few weeks I've been hosting workshops on Planning Your Marketing and have found the workshops very informative not only for those attending as well as myself. In an effort to extend the reach of our Aha Moments at the workshops, I've included three of the ideas discussed in hopes that you can take advantage of these in building your client base to market your business.

Aha moment #1 - Market Where Your Audience Is.

The first Aha Moment our group discussed is something that's always been part of print advertising. You need to invest in those mediums where your customers and clients frequent. Here are a few examples:

1. A business that sells environmental modification products to keep seniors in their homes with safety equipment might be tempted to market their products online. A mix of print and online will be more effective because their client base read newspapers and use telephone books and their children us social media.
2. An organization having an event for families with teens will find promoting the event through Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat to be very effective in getting to the best audience.

What if you want to fine tune where to market for your business? Identify at least ten of your clients you feel are your ideal clients. Do a search on Google of their full name, company name, city, state and if you know their phone number do that, too. Notice what websites and social media sites appear in the search and chart it out. See the similarities among the clients. This search test will not only confirm facts you already know. It will also uncover new marketing ideas. Sometimes you even discover you are mentioned on a social media where you aren't even on.

Aha moment #2 – The Importance of Your Facebook Page.

Creating a Facebook Page with its cover photo, profile photo, and content is very important in sharing your business on Facebook and being found on Google. It helps those who know your business to support you by becoming a fan of your page as well as helps to find new fans who can learn about your business. Along with doing that, your Facebook Page becomes a location where your posts, ads, boosts, videos, and photos are located.

In a recent meeting, with a potential client, he proudly shared posts that were created for his Facebook page. They were visually pleasing and full of information but lacked any sort of link. In fact what was part of the post was a reference to go to their Facebook page to purchase a product that was on their website. Not a one link to anything!!!!

Ready for the Aha Moment?

So, I asked him this question, “How often does a person visit your Facebook page once they like your page?” Think about that for a minute. When I've asked this questions I get all sorts of answers. Hundreds of times seems to be the normal answer. Are you ready? The answer is never, unless you redirect them back to the page with a link. The reason they never have to go back is because your posts, boosts and ads are delivered to their timeline. Oh, yes, there's a hyperlink on every post but nine times out of ten, a person isn't going to click on it unless they need to check something in particular. Lesson to learn from this? Include a link as part of your posts. Mix it up with links to pages on your website, events, other social media platforms, and videos. Those are just a few ideas.

Aha Moment #3 - Build your email list from your LinkedIn connections.

What? You can export your connections from LinkedIn? Yes. LinkedIn provides an export feature. Where? Click on My Network and go to Connections. Once there, click on the gear to the right hand side in the heading. Under the gear you will find a variety of ways to synchronize your contacts. To the right hand side, you will see Advanced Settings and the first choice is to Export LinkedIn Connections. There will be a variety of choices to export. The export will only provide you with your first level connections. From here you can import them into your email account as well as your email management system.

We hope these Aha Moments provide you with a variety of ideas and tools to help better build your client base to market your services or products. Want to be a part of our upcoming workshops? Feel free to attend any of the following: Drive New Business with Social Media Marketing on February 9, 2017 at 3 p.m. and Measure and Plan Your Marketing for 2017 on February 16, 2017 at 3 p.m. .

Interested in hosting a workshop for your organization or clients? Give us a call at 484.709.6564.