There’s a reason that diversification is a sound practice in many areas including your investing and your marketing. When it comes to diversification, you want to make sure that all your efforts are not focused on only one item or group. Here are several suggestions to make sure your online efforts will be effective in multiple market channels.
Create your core website…
If you don’t already have a company website, now is the time to get it established. Whatever other online efforts you make, they should all direct people to your website where they can find answers and information on your products, services, and organization. You will share these details in other places too, but your website will have pages that are all about your efforts. These are all in one place and will take only a click or two for any reader to discover. Social media sites offer very little opportunity to keep the important details all at hand. Instead, information is found in posts that may have happened months earlier and searching for the information is difficult at best.
Decide on at least two different social media platforms that will be the best way to contact your target audience…
As an example, Pinterest is a great place if you are targeting DIY people or moms who have children still living at home. Twitter targets people who process information in small bits of 140 words or less. Instagram is all about the amazing picture, and you may never know if followers even read the posts you attach to those pictures. Facebook is for posts that are longer than Twitter or Instagram but still tend to do better when they are not more than one or two paragraphs. And blogs or e-zines are for when you have feature-length articles to share with others. Depending on your target audience, niche, and brand, you should pick platforms that will seek out and speak to the people most likely to want what you offer.
You don’t need to limit yourself to only two platforms, and there are many more platforms available to try such as Vine, Vimeo, Square, YouTube, and more. So don’t feel you are limited to picking from the top three or four most known platforms.
Check the platform paid advertising options…
Those platforms that have them give you some incredible opportunities to target the exact group you want for as little as a dollar or two a day. And you can limit how long they run to just a few hours or to several months. That means you can create an ad or campaign and test it. Test what times or days work best as well as tweak the target audience and campaign until you get a great result.
Only then should you run your campaign for more than a few days. But even when you get it honed to get the best results, keep testing and trying new approaches. You will soon discover, if you haven’t already, that nothing continues to work at peak performance forever.
At any point in the process, you can bring in professionals to amp up your results and efforts. Hiring a PR firm or full-time PR staff member can be the perfect next step in your growth projections. If it is not yet the right time for such a move, follow the steps listed above and create your marketing and branding plan to bring the maximum growth for your company.