Here’s a picture of what I like to do in my spare time! —>
Music is one of my passions. It might be a little unrelated to sharing my thoughts about online marketing. But, maybe it’s not.
Big corporate brands that only promote new product info online? That is sooo 2005.
Get with the times people. The Internet is now a place for emotional and visceral connections. Yes computers are involved, but there are real flesh and fingers behind those computer screens and keyboards. Well most of them. So let’s take some lessons from real life, and try to use it in our online marketing to connect with our customers and audience.
The Introduction.
Some hug, some kiss, some shake hands, and some stand at a distance. No matter what happens you see each other! So try to incorporate some pictures of yourself or you and your family into your online presence. Give your prospective friends, clients, and customers a visual introduction of yourself. Yes people can make absurd judgements based on how you look, but you don’t want those customers anyways. There are tons of people turning from big corporations to the little guys, and this is partly because they know the individual that stands behind the computer screen, counter, or desk. They can look at what you stand for as a person and company and say, “I want to associate myself with that”.
The Greeting
The other part of the introduction is the greeting. This is where people doing it wrong really drop off the wagon hard. Automation can be useful if you have thousands of people a month signing up to your email newsletter, and it would be a little crazy to write a personalized email to each one. But, social media introductions should be far from a copy & paste sales pitch(which I get all too often). “Thanks for following, you must really love me and what I’m selling, please click here to buy it!”. No. Bad. SOCIAL media is so people can connect in a real way using technology. A simple “thanks for following” will suffice. Or if you have the time, I would encourage you to learn something about the person, even if it’s a simple profile picture or biography comment like, “hey I noticed you like hockey, me too. Go Canucks!”
Website Greetings
If you have a lot of new traffic stumbling upon your website, maybe you want to create a special introduction for them. For the first 2 times viewing the website from that computer(tracked by cookies), a special pop up can show up with a picture, quick blurb about who you are, what you’re doing, or maybe even a short video you’ve created profiling yourself or your business. The point is to make it a very personal and real introduction, not a selling video. A great tool for making these pop ups or landing pages is leadpages.net. It isn’t a free tool, but there are tips and tricks you can use if you’re making your own landing pages.
Personality Day to Day
For those that have followed your blog or social media, it is important to give them snippets of your personality through your posts. If all of your updates are links to your blog, and all the content in your blog is dry and strictly information you won’t get very far. Your audience wants to see your personality, whether it’s posting about your favourite TV show once in a while or having a very bold uncensored writing style for your blog. Be yourself!
Make yourself shine through their screens.
Joel Harrison
