The internet has truly revolutionized the way we work, interact and even think & as a photographer I can reach so much further with my work.
Using the Internet to attract more customers is something that intrigues me so off I wandered to a half day seminar with Nigel Temple (www.nigeltemple.com & www.themarketingcompass.com). Despite an optimistic head shot (well, we all choose one we really like!) this guy really knows his stuff so I thought I’d share some of what I learned in a couple or three blogs:
DELTA – this is a five stage approach to attracting more customers & was the theme of the day; Discovery, Engagement, Learning, Trading and Advocacy.
Discovery is a really interesting one so lets focus on that one now – if my customers can’t find me then they can’t buy from me (same for any business) and there seem to be three main ways in which we can be “found”.
Directories
Search Engines
Social networking sites.
All out there and, to some extent overlapping one another.
For example Facebook has to be arguably the most known about social networking site in the world with somewhere north of 600 million users but it’s also a directory of sorts (and of course has business pages).
Linkedin caters very much for b2b (business to business) with somewhere over 100 million users, and twitter which is growing at an exponential rate seems to cater for both social networking and business users alike.
Throw in the search engines – Google being the goliath here handling over 80% of all searches and we have some amazing tools to help us get known.
So – some trade advice coming up on Discovery;
1) If you are not blogging then start, you all have qualities and abilities so either comment on them, or as I hope I’m doing now relay helpful information out to others. Follow other blogs and comment on them (but make it relevant!).
2) Change your web site frequently, Google likes this and will index you more.
3) And lastly – if you do nothing else than this create links out to like minded, relevant companies or people; They will probably link back to you and the more inbound links you have the better.
Slightly over the recommended 400 word count for a blog but I hope the start of something helpful? Next up some great tools to help you see how effective you have been with the three suggestions above, some more on D for discovery and then onto Engagement – how to get someone to buy from you….
