Ideas & Opportunities

Long gone are the days when you can relax in the confines of your office, pop out a cigar, and confidently say: “If I build it, they will come.”

Hence, the Internet is about building something and reaching out.

To become successful in this online world, the first rule is to embrace the fact that the Internet’s a totally different beast compared to traditional media. The Internet is the individual consumer’s domain, and that there’s virtually no room for any type of “megaphone marketing” online.

If you’re really serious about making it big online, then you should be thinking within the lines of engagement and interaction. But before you even get there, you should first ask yourself: Where is my business online?!

There are three surefire ways to get your business the attention it needs, and I’m not talking about mere eyeballs—I’m talking about attention that sticks, and attention that translates into waves and waves of online conversations building your brand the presence it needs.

 
1. Search Engine Marketing

If you want to do some in-your-face marketing to approach your customers head on, then there’s no better way to do this but through SEM or search engine marketing. In fact, majority of the Web’s population start their online journey through a search engine, hence, it just makes sense to be readily visible via search.

What makes it different from your traditional marketing efforts is that the experience of searching can never be more personal and finding the information you need via search accounts a lot for relevance—you need to be relevant and you need to explore SEM!

So what exactly is search engine marketing? Practically SEM can be divided into search engine optimization (SEO) and paid search (PPC Advertising). SEO, fundamentally being a set of methods that make it easier for search engines to find, include, and categorize your Web content on search results while paid search or PPC (pay-per-click) advertising, simply put, is advertising via search engines (that is, either sponsored search results or text ads).

 

Let’s just say that you are relevant to your customers, how are you engaging them online? Are you speaking in their language when you connect with them? Do they even respond when you say something? The catchphrase is, “let’s transform ME to WE,” and that basically summarizes why you need to explore social media marketing—you need to stop thinking about yourself and start thinking of community building, if not customer engagement.

Social media marketing is capitalizing on using social media embassies relevant to your business to connect, converse, and be friends with your existing and potential customers. Just look at how successful online businesses on Multiply operate—they pretty much handhold their customers and talk to them on a personal level through different social communications channels like Facebook and Twitter.

When you think of social media, just think about humanizing your brand and your business, and genuinely make it huggable by your customers.

 
3. Content Marketing

What exactly should be visible on search, and what exactly should you be talking about on social media? Well, you need content and you need to be strategic about it.

When you stop talking, then you stop doing business, hence, you need to take content marketing seriously. And for the sake of defining content marketing, it’s basically the creation and sharing of relevant content for the purpose of engaging existing and potential customers.

You can start by simply looking at the many different ways your business can be relevant to your customers and start talking about these in your customer’s language or voice.—

 

Jurgen Estanislao is a professional SEO and a passionate digital strategist. He maintains the website jurgenestanislao.com. Currently, Estanislao is Multiply Philippines’ SEM and social media manager.

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