Immediate engagement starts before your prospects visit your site. Maybe they’ve listened to those enlightened podcasts you’ve been cranking out for the last few months, or seen the wacky videos you’ve posted on YouTube.

The more you focus on drawing prospects from social media, the more likely they will get to know you on a personal level before they know you professionally. Once they’re engaged, don’t loose them with corporate speak.

BAD, BAD HOME PAGE
Consider the following example from the home page of the fictional Happy Baby Megacorp website.

At Happy Baby Megacorp, makers of Happy Baby Cloth Diapers, the rashless diaper solution, and H.B. Powder Ups, the only baby powder with added vitamins, our goal is to be the global leader in portable infant waste entrapment and removal solutions for working mothers, in-home infant health care workers, and government-supported and private health care facilities.

Seriously, nobody cares what your goals are. They just want their babies’ butts to be clean. Building loyalty comes from helping people meet their needs. As marketing professionals, you already know that.

The danger for us as marketers is the potential disconnect between the personal voice we use with social media and the professional voice we use on our website, particularly the home page. So how do we maintain our professional dignity without losing their interest?

First, be consistent with your message. You can’t just go off on some obscure diaper example without having an underlying message that matches the message on your site. Have fun with the social media, but stay on message.

Second, always talk to your prospects on their level. That gives a consistent feel to the conversation as they move from connecting with you “out there� in the social media universe to their interaction with your website and eventually with you.

Third, engage them at every step. Your vision statement sounds like the Happy Baby Megacorp example above. Keep it to yourself. Consider how your home page sounds to the person who only knows you from your quirky blog posts.

Finally, use excellent organic seo practices. People may be entertained by your social media content, but they will likely use search to find the right solution.

SEO’s flexibility gives you the advantage of being able to quickly change as the market changes. Suppose a competitor posts an obnoxiously cute video on YouTube for their “Super Baby rash-free diapers.â€Â� Before you know it, their video is flying around the internet and people start to search on “rash-free diapersâ€Â�… but you’ve built your empire on “rashless diapers.â€Â�

Incorporating new terms in a way that sounds natural is the cornerstone of ethical search engine optimization. When your message is consistent, talks to your target audience on their level, addresses their needs, and when your site uses good seo copy writing so people can find you, then you can connect with them effectively with social media and search.

Tags: happy baby megacorp, rashless diaper solutions, seo, seo copy writing, social media

This entry was posted on Friday, February 1st, 2008 at 11:37 am and is filed under blogging, marketing, seo, SEO blog, social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.