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Word of mouth is the best form of advertising, and the social media provides access to its online cousin. MPA’s Tim Neary goes in search of expert opinion to determine exactly what this new phenomenon is and how best to use it to grow your business.

In an ever increasingly competitive world if someone offered you a way to keep your clients close and attract new prospects everyday – you’d jump at it, right? And if it was overwhelmingly inexpensive, that would be even better, yes?

Well, all of this is possible through the latest marketing trend called the social media. 

One of the ways that social media benefits especially small to medium sized businesses is by making it easier for them to interact with both their prospective and existing customers, says Michael Lam, director at Vovia Online Marketing. 

“Only make sure that you interact as a person; rather than a corporation, in order to appear genuine and build up trust,” he says.

Equal
Easily the biggest benefit the social media offers to small and medium sized businesses is a level playing field.

“It’s just as easy for an independent business to set-up and use social media tools as it is for big business. Joining these networks is usually free, so the only cost to setting up a leading social media presence is a bit of your time,” Lam says. 

They can take many forms such as social networks, blogs, discussion forums, wikis, and more.  The common element is that the sites are a platform for users to communicate and share, whether it be thoughts, opinions, photos, or videos. 

In particular, applications like Facebook or Twitter provide a unique opportunity to solicit the ideas and opinions with potential and existing clients and address customer service issues - and build up a loyal brand following. 

In addition, both of these social networks allow you to build up a following which can be used for marketing purposes.

“To announce new products or sales promotions - although directly marketing through social networks is usually frowned upon so it must be done subtly,” says Lam.

For brokers LinkedIn might be their best bet as business-orientated social networking site. “It offers loads of features beyond just building a profile,” says Lam, “…with LinkedIn you can join groups related to your industry, post and find jobs, answer questions to display your expertise, and generate recommendations from former clients.”

One site that is often overlooked is Yahoo! Answers. People post questions to the site, users submit answers to the question and the best answer is voted on. This can be a great way to demonstrate your expertise. Plus you can place a link to your site in your answer, so you can use it to drive traffic back to your site.

“There have been hundreds of mortgage-related questions asked on Yahoo! Answers this month alone,” says Lam. 

Blogs are another great way to increase your business footprint. Writing one can be an extremely effective way to promote your brand and drive search engine traffic.

But if you don’t have the time to maintain a blog, you can still leverage their power, says Lam. “One way is to approach popular bloggers on your topic and offer to contribute a guest post – this gives you exposure to the blog readers while providing the blogger with fresh, original content,” he adds. 

The principal difference between a corporate blog and ‘standard’ web content lies in the character of its content, and the style in which the content is disseminated and made available to people. 

“Rather than the formal style of traditional websites’ marketing driven copy, the blog should be written in a personable style which provides a platform for the business to produce a persona,” says Robert Beerworth, managing director at web design and development firm Wiliam. 

Google
The primary reason for a business to put a blog in is to generate qualified traffic to the website.

Most corporate websites have a very low amount of traffic, says Beerworth.  “There is no reason to go there; you can’t read them anyway and they are just not interesting. Yet with a blog you can be producing interesting, topical, funny and useful information.”

And that starts to attract traffic. And, since being ranked first in Google is the most important thing in any website, blogs are a great way to get you there by generating good quality organic links.

“Because if you are writing interesting things people will reference you and site you and link to you, and that benefits your search engine optimisation (SEO),” says Beerworth.

A couple of core components make up a search strategy.

Having plenty of content in the search engines is the first. And referencing certain key words is the next - the more you use certain words the more likely Google is going to reference your content. And having outside people link to your blogsite is the key component.  Commenting on his own blogging activity, Beerworth says because Wiliam has written so many blogs over the years thousands of people link to them now looking for an opinion or advice. 

“This drives more traffic and improves [Google] ranking,” he says.

All of the business objectives that a broker can have can all be achieved through a blog since it allows you to write very targeted content.

“When consumers search for a mortgage broker they search through a number of criteria, and inevitably one of those is going to be geographical. Say they are looking for a broker in Surrey Hills or Kalgoorlie or wherever it happens to be – so if you have lots of content about a deal that you just brokered in your area, or trends that you are seeing in your area, or that there was a great piece of news in the local press about your area – then when someone does that search you are going to be the first they will find. 

“Corporate blogging means you are more likely to be found for the kind of search terms that people are looking for. And you can start to put into your content the sorts of words and phrases that you think are relevant, and over time you are building this repository of content that puts you into a fairly unassailable position, compared to your competitors who aren’t doing that,” says Beerworth

Another spin off is that it allows you to put your approachability and experience on display. You want people to contact you on the basis that they will get the best home loan at the right price. For a customer to see a broker making such a clear effort to talk and be so clearly immersed in the industry means they are probably more likely to make contact - than if they just hit a website with a name and contact phone number.  
 
“Blogging says a lot about you and it forms a one-to-one relationship. Consumers recognise the effort and get a real feel for the writer, so when they pick up the phone they are much more comfortable with whom they are talking to,” says Beerworth.

Web Years
Blogs take several months before they start to produce the sorts of results – like the traffic and the contacts and the enquiries – that make a difference.

It might be a medium to long term strategy – but that doesn’t mean it’ll take ‘real’ years to get the results.

“But,” says Beerworth, “almost inevitably the business gives up before then, because it loses patience.”

It does take patience and support for the business to ride through those initial few months where there is no gratification. But if you put the effort in, the return will come.

Stick to it, and six months in expect to be saying things like why didn’t I do this earlier? Or even, how many blogs can I do?

“They really start getting into it, because they start getting phone calls from other audiences like the media and from press – as well as potential new clients,” he says.

Writing a blog a day is probably overkill, rather aim to write one blog a week. Less frequently than that is also okay, but the deal is that only quality posts are allowed. There is already a lot of rubbish out there; Beerworth says, and people only read good content.

One of the tendencies with blogs - because the business is doing it for traffic - is that posts are put up with little thought of the content with the attitude being ‘well I did it’. But, says Beerworth, “if people aren’t going to read it, it’s not going to help them form an opinion, and it is not going to lead to them wanting to talk to you because it sounds like you know what you are talking about. Then you are losing a lot of the benefits.”

For a quality blog that has opinion and difference the test is: would someone pay you to hear you say this? 

Blog content should avoid talking about what you do and focus rather on how you do it. And while good corporate blogs are open to debate, for small and medium sized companies Beerworth thinks doing so is rarely a good idea, because there won’t be a large enough community of people following that size of business. Rather for them he says the blog should be used as a way of disseminating information.

“The strategy here should be to position yourself as a thought leader by commenting on breaking challenges and transactions in the industry and providing real benefit driven content to users,” he says. 

Big enough
There is no such thing as a business that is too small to benefit from the social media phenomenon, but there might be practical impediments to small businesses if they are not committed. 

With small and medium sized businesses struggling to do everything all the time, it is the smartest way to grow a business, says Beerworth.  

“It produces the most qualified traffic in the most cost effective way. Somebody that types in ‘Sydney broker’ wants a Sydney broker and if you are there talking about say, fixed versus variable interest rates and giving commentary, then you are going to stand out as the person to contact,” he adds.

The real issue is not whether the small or medium sized business would do well from having a blog on its website, but is whether or not it can maintain it.  

“In fact, it is the small businesses that benefit the most,” he says.