Spreading the word.

There are numerous ways that you can get your message out to potential customers, but the main ones are advertising & PR. I know that online is a huge area, but, in this instance I am grouping advertising together as advertising encompasses TV, radio, magazines, local press, billboards, leaflets, Blogs, podcasts, social media, public speaking, networking etc etc.
In this post, let’s look at getting your message out via advertising. In my opinion, one of the key aims of advertising is to get word of mouth marketing. I posted on Twitter recently that 53% of online traffic at the moment comes via WOM. When your satisfied customers tell others how great you are and suggest that they also use your product or service, that’s pretty much the best kind of publicity you can get!

To get this process started and before anyone can talk about your business, they need to know about it and this is where the initiatives mentioned above come into play. Sometimes, this can come from a YouTube video, sometimes it can come from social media and/or traditional advertising in a local paper or it can even come from giving out samples in the high street. It almost doesn’t matter how it get’s started; it matters that it does get started.
Do you know when people are most motivated to tell others about you? This might shock you, but it is right after they have bought or made a purchase.
Here are just some suggestions on how to spread the word:
Offer customers a reward for doing so; maybe a coupon for the contact details of 3 friends who might have a similar need to them.
Add a ‘tell a friend’ or ‘share’ button to your website or Blog.
Create space for them to talk. i.e. adding some sort of forum to your website.
Maybe introduce some sort of limited edition label to what you do.
Create a club that gives benefits to members.

Whatever you decide to do, people will always talk about the outstanding or unusual!

Social Media Optimization

Ranking high on major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing is not a paid endeavour, but rather a combination of factors, including:
• How long your Web site has existed.
• How much traffic your site has.
• How relevant your content is to the term being searched.
• How many relevant links you have, inbound or outbound.


To fully understand the wherewithal’s my suggestion is to firstly add analytics to your website. What is analytics? It is a code that your web developer can insert into the html template (before the ‘body’ tag) that allows you to actually monitor how traffic arrtives at your website. It also allows you to see what the browser did when on your site, what percentage of browsers pressed the dreaded ‘back’ button, what terms were used to get the there etc etc. Put simply, this free tool is essential in SEO and SEM.

More Traffic
Once the foundations have been laid (see a previous article), a well-crafted SEO campaign can really make a difference to driving the right sort of traffic, but more and more techniques are being developed every day. One of the emerging techniques is Social Media Optimization (SMO). SMO is a great way to amplify the strength of an SEO campaign. It uses social media to promote a site. And with a vast number of social media sites being developed, SMO is the future of SEO.

There are a number of sites that spring to mind when constructing SMO, but YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are the major players. These three sites are commonly used by browsers for search functions and there are already arguments that Facebook is fast becoming the number one source of referring traffic— even ahead of Google.There is already a foundation for social media, since almost everybody has social media profile or a YouTube account. The browsers are there, and it’s just a matter of turning them into clients.

If you need help in this key area of marketing, please get in touch with me by emailing paul@bathmarketingconsultancy.co.uk or by filling out the contact form on my website.