Marketing Your Business Online

Kilted Chaos is launching a new service for business owners who want to market their business online.  Focusing on four key areas, we will:

1/ Write quality content that is SEO optimized and interesting for the visitor to read

2/ Manage and respond to responses to content

3/ Produce easy to understand weekly analytics and adapt behavior in light of data

4/ Handle all technical upgrades and implement & suggest new technologies as appropriate

So you’ve got your easy to update website, a professional looking logo and avatar, a Twitter account a Facebook page and a few pictures of your business up on Flickr, what next?  Well, this is supposed to be the easy bit, (easy in that you don’t need any tech skills to do it): adding content, writing blog posts, talking about your business and what you do, responding to comments and tweets, making friends with your customers – oh and yes - still managing the day to day operations of your business.

For the majority of our clients it’s the business owner themselves who sits at the computer, during the trading day if they’re lucky, but more typically out of hours.  The rush of content that seems so easy in the first couple of weeks becomes harder to sustain and after a few months dries up.   There’s no doubt that marketing your business online brings customers in and it’s true that the tools developed in the last few years have practically eliminated the technical barriers – however, no one has yet invented the magic machine that generates the extra hours in the day needed to do all this.

The trap that a lot of small business owners fall into at this point is to think that it is all about the addition of content – and nice “keyword heavy” content at that.  It’s pretty easy to find someone who will write you a keyword packed article for $5.00 that is practically unreadable.   For a better understanding of what your site content should be, check out this great article on web copy from Claire Mason of Leapfrogg – a classy boutique digital marketing firm in the UK.

 But say that you’ve seen the light and have employed a professional writer, one that can actually project enthusiasm for your product with correct spelling and grammar – what happens next?  A new blog post will register on your Twitter feed and on your Facebook page and a customer can interact with that content through a blog comment, a retweet, a reply to a tweet, a post on your wall, etc – who’s going to respond to that?

And with all this activity taking place – who’s tracking what’s working and what isn’t?  Sure you have sales receipts as the ultimate arbiter of success but using blogging and social media to market your business takes time.  You don’t see results straight away, it takes a while to generate reputation and for people to react to that reputation.  If you’re really dropping the hammer you might have produced 25 blog posts over a two month period – which ones were successful and why – how can you learn from your content – what do the analytics say?

Finally – the predominately free tools that you’re now using – WordPress, Plugins, commenting systems, etc – they all get upgraded as new technologies are implemented and security holes fixed.  They’re super easy to upgrade but someone needs to be on top of it – and if you’re allocating out one aspect of your online marketing – should you not make sure the core machinery is taken care of?

There’s a lot to think about – as evidenced by the length of this post – but if you want to start taking your online marketing seriously – get in touch – prices start from as low as $100.

Photo Credit: grunge on Flickr