by Mark Still
There is no shortage of advice on how to achieve marketing brilliance online for your business but two basic ideas are critical - relevance and consistency.
Relevance
To be successful at anything, your message must be relevant to your work. What you say matters more than where you say it. For a retailer, this doesn’t mean that every tweet should be an effort to close a sale but it does mean that if your store’s primary business is fishing tackle, your message should revolve around fishing and activities important to your fishing community. While it’s tempting to cast a wider net, straying from your expertise is counterproductive to the goal of building your fishing business so save the cycling posts for your personal Facebook page unless you’ve got a great story about riding your bike to the lake to go fishing.
Consistency
Most business functions carry some particular expectation of consistency and online activities are no different. One brilliant blog post followed by a year of silence isn’t going to gain you any followers but monthly posts will build credibility and a following over time. Updating your website and posting to Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest carry their own expectations so don’t jump in without a plan for posting and updating on a regular schedule. You open and close the store consistently don’t you? What would happen to your business if some weeks your store was open on Saturday and some weeks it wasn’t? Open at 9:00am on Monday and 11:22a on Tuesday? Silly, right?
Randomly posting irrelevant information is a waste of time at best and possibly damaging to your credibility and SEO efforts. No matter where you choose to promote your business, talk about what is relevant and talk about it consistently and you’ll go a long way toward building a customer base that can support a successful venture for years to come.