Adding Social Media to Your DM Strategy

December, 2007

As you probably know, we are really intrigued by the idea and use of social media as part of your direct marketing strategy. Last month, we attended the BlogWorldExpo. Wow! Talk about ROI – we attended several great sessions each and learned from some of the social media pioneers on how to successfully integrate social media into the DM toolkit. We thought that the savvy direct marketers who read our monthly newsletter might be interested in some of our key takeaways from the conference.

Here are some interesting points to ponder as you determine how to get started:

• Creating a company blog allows you to demonstrate and discuss your core strengths to both your existing customers, as well as to potential prospects. And it allows them to effectively interact with you — thus, allowing you to build stronger customer relationships.
• You can effectively build your customer base through building a community online. At the same time, you are also building the reputation of your business through an effective and thought-provoking blog.
• You can add to your profitability by effectively leveraging your blog and building your online community.
• Utilizing social media to create open and honest dialog with your online community will help to create credibility for your company. It also can establish you as the company with the expertise that serves a particular industry best.
• Social media is transparent — so be aware of this. If your corporate culture isn’t healthy, sooner or later this will come through loud and clear to your online community. On the other hand, if you have a healthy and positive corporate culture, this will also come through and will be of huge benefit. Through your online community, your customers will have a better chance of understanding what you are all about — and this builds customer loyalty.
• Finally, use controversy in your posts – but never use it to evoke anger. Your posts live forever! Don’t write anything that you think that — when calmer minds prevail — you’ll wish you hadn’t.

We hope that these ideas will help you to begin to consider how you can build social media into your marketing strategy. We feel pretty strongly that by embracing this channel today, you’ll be setting yourself up for success in the future. Now that we’ve learned so much about it, we wish we’d begun years ago.

We’ll update you from time to time on how social media is helping us to build our business, in the hopes that we may be able to spark a Big Idea for you and your business. Conversely, if you’d like to talk with us about how you may begin to integrate social media into your company’s strategy, just give us a call at (503) 206-5255. We’d love to help you build your online community and create profitable customer relationships.