It’s guest post day here at Duct Tape Marketing and today’s guest post is from Jeremy Miller – Enjoy!
Social media is a powerful set of tools for marketers to connect with prospects and clients, but social media has its limitations.
Not all of your customers are active on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram. And not all of your customers are allowing social media to affect their buying decisions.
Go beyond social media. Engage your customers on all fronts, and create the impression that your brand is everywhere.
Make your brand highly visible
Marketing sets the condition for the sale to happen.
As John Jantsch says, “Marketing is essentially getting someone that has a need to know, like and trust you. Of course then you must turn that know, like, and trust into try, buy, repeat and refer.” This is what he calls the Marketing Hourglass.
Moving a customer through the Marketing Hourglass is accelerated and enhanced with repeat exposure. An experience with your sales team can be heightened and reinforced with social media, and vice versa. Each interaction with your brand builds upon itself and moves the customer through the seven stages of the Hourglass.
Create the impression your brand is everywhere
Let’s move beyond theory and consider a company example from my upcoming book, Sticky Branding.
Brilliant is a rapidly growing staffing firm with offices in Chicago and Southern Florida. The company specializes in recruiting accounting, finance, and IT professionals for mid-sized companies.
The firm’s marketing strategy is to be everywhere. Jim Wong, CEO of Brilliant, says, “I want us to be everywhere, or I want people to think we’re everywhere.”
To create the impression the brand is everywhere, the firm employs three core programs to engage its customers:
- Sponsorship: Brilliant sponsors events and associations that serve small- and mid-sized companies in its geographic markets.
- Content Marketing: Brilliant publishes weekly email newsletters that are tailored for its audiences. The company has four business units, and each one has corresponding email programs.
- Social Media: Brilliant places the most emphasis on Facebook and LinkedIn, because these are the social networks that both employers and job seekers are actively involved in.
Sponsorship is Brilliant’s primary vehicle for participating and supporting its communities, while content marketing and social media are designed to reinforce and enhance that investment.
Jim says, “It builds confidence in our brand. It’s like, ‘I saw them online, and then I saw them sponsoring our conference last month. They’re everywhere.’ Popping up everywhere leads prospects back to us, and it sets the condition for a sale.”
Promote with purpose
To move customers through the seven stages of the Marketing Hourglass — know, like, trust, try, buy, repeat, refer — requires marketing with purpose.
The question, or the challenge for your business, is what else can you do?
Where can you engage your customers with purpose? Facebook and LinkedIn are a great way to engage your clients online. What about in person?
Like Brilliant, develop three to five recurring programs that engage your customers over and over again to create the impression your brand is everywhere.
When your customers see your brand again and again they will think of it first when they have a need. And being considered first is a powerful position for your brand.
Jeremy Miller is a Brand Builder, Keynote Speaker, and president of Sticky Branding — a brand building agency. After rebranding his family’s business, Jeremy embarked on a decade long study of how small- and mid-sized companies grow incredible brands. He knows what it takes to grow a Sticky Brand and how you can do it too. His upcoming book, Sticky Branding: 12.5 Principles to Stand Out, Attract Customers and Grow an Incredible Brand, will be published in January 2015.
