You can not start a business, rent a space, stock it with stuff, unlock the doors and expect people to come flocking in with their wallets loaded with cash. Nope! Doesn’t happen that way! You have to speak to them! Communication is the only way to develop a relationship with your client or customer. And it is not complicated to get that communication started from the moment you unlock the front door.
Start a Newsletter! Start a Blog! You need both for a variety of reasons. First, you want to keep in touch with your customers, clients and prospects on a regular basis so they are updated with the latest news. Simply by sending out an Email newsletter with your business name at the top, triggers name recognition and familiarity. You want to share notifications, changes to practices, new products and employee promotions. You also want to let them know about any new and interesting information you have learned, classes that you may be offering or how to operate certain products and services. You can go into detail in a newsletter article and include photos or art to explain your subject further.
A newsletter allows you to get personal. You can announce births and marriages, share vacation photos and interesting weekend jaunts. You want your audience to know you and your company so that they continue to support you and use your products and services. The more your name, your brand and your news is in front of your customers, clients and prospects, the more comfortable they feel and the more they will trust.
Blogs can also offer many benefits. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is usually the most important reason that people want to write blogs. It will drive traffic to your website where your blog has a home. Keywords used throughout the blog will your website to be found when people are searching for certain information that you offer. Using those keywords in the title of the blog and in the URL draws the traffic in. But, you still want your content to be interesting so that you hold an audience and develop followers.
Blogs can also be used for your social media contacts and general marketing. Develop followers every time you publish a new blog post by sharing it on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and even Pinterest. Over time, people will look forward to you blogs and share it with others. This is how you develop a brand. Always include a photo or artwork in your blogs as these get shared more often than those without.
You can also build an email list with a blog by offering subscriptions. They can sign up for downloads for how-to projects or patterns. Capture their email address and add it to your list. Offer a club where you give extras away if they join. You can also capture email addresses by having a Youtube channel. Depending on what you offer, followings and subscriptions grow by huge numbers with videos. Ebooks and tutorials are also very popular. Develop a sidebar on your blog page where people can sign up for your offerings. Have them fill out the form and hit send and it will automatically put them on your email list.
Even though you have a blog on your website and you share it on your social media pages, you are going to want to take advantage of the email list you have been developing and send them your blogs out regularly. Just send a photo from your blog with the teaser first paragraph in the email with a bottom website link. “Read More” can be set in a box as the link.
And finally, your blog should show off your talents, abilities and interests. A strong blog has a sense of authority throughout. You know what you are talking about and your audience likes that. That is why they follow you! It develops trust in not only you but in your brand. People are more likely to sign up, purchase, follow and share when they trust you. Be consistent with your publishing timetable and cover subject matter that is interesting to your target audience. It will take a bit of time, but eventually, you will have a following that will look to you for advice and authority!
In today’s digital age, email is one of the easiest, cheapest, and most convenient ways to market to a broad audience. If you’re wanting to reach individuals but perhaps are unsure of whether you’d like to do Direct Mail to people’s mailboxes, we at Everest Direct Mail and Marketing, can help you create a virtual mail campaign directly to people’s inboxes instead. With our highly skilled copywriters, we can create interesting and attention-grabbing emails to send out to prospects. We can create a full email marketing campaign, with follow up emails and automatic response emails that lead the clients directly to you. These emails can be highly personalized with merge fields specific to the person being emailed, just like a direct mail campaign. You can hyper-target the recipients through a detailed list and set up an exact schedule these emails are to go out.
